McCarthy Vs Furman - the first 176 pages

[grahamthomson]

Which Transformers writer is better, based on their first 176 pages of published Transformers material, McCarthy or Furman?

In McCarthy's first 176 pages, he's scripted 58% of All Hail Megatron and Spotlight Blurr.

In his first 176 pages, Furman scripted The Enemy Within, Raiders of the Last Ark, Decepticon Dam-Busters, The Wrath of Guardian, The Wrath of Grimlock, The Icarus Theory, and Dinobot-Hunt.

Compare, contrast and confer!

[charlesrocketboy]

Frankly, Dinobot Hunt on its own wins. Mutliple characters are developed, the villains are terrifying bastards, and there's awesome action scenes - all in the equivalent length of AHM #1-2.

[blueshift]

Whilst his early early stuff isn't amazing, once we get into Guardian / The Icarus Theory it is amazing

Heck, go back and check out the first page of... Wrath of Grimlock, with the big countdown. That is /brilliant/. It makes me sit back and say "/wow/"

[KoshNaranek]

No contest, Furman wins hands down.

- Tony

[The Doctor]

The Fur-Man is top dog. He's an old school writer and is better with shorter page counts. Compare his current IDW work with his Titan strips: he crams just as much (sometimes more) into 11 pages than in a 22 page US comic.

In contrast what I've had read of McCarthy's has been content light, which I've got no time for now comics are so expensive.

People are still buying copies of Dinobot Hunt in reprints 23 years after it was produced despite being a cheap and disposable children's toy tie-in weekly strip. I can't see AHM still selling 23 years later.

-Ralph

[Deleted]

The Furmanator is the obvious winner. McCarthy's scripts just don't seem to get going while Furman's take you straight into the action and gives the reader a fantastic story to read as well.

[Andy Turnbull]

Furman comes out on top. No contest.

Andy

[blueshift]

Well thing is, when his back is against the wall I actually rate Furman as a brilliant writer /of the medium/ not just Transformers. His early stuff has these fantastic burst of creativity with styles and techniques that you barely ever see in anything nowadays.

[charlesrocketboy]

Actually, by going straight to Dinobot Hunt I am shortchanging his earliest stuff. They're crude and you can tell Enemy Within is the work of a newbie, but there's a quick pace, lots of events, good character moments for several bods, and some nice use of techniques you can only really do in comics. Note the end of Enemy Within Part 1: two-panel cliffhanger with the two rogues in the same situation, comparing and contrasting while delivering a dual cliffhanger.

AHM doesn't do anything like that.

(Sadly, often these days Furman doesn't either, nor do most creators. It's a pity. John Wagner may be the only guy in comics still using thought balloons. )

[primenova]

WHO?? Vs Simon Furman

'nuff said.

[Kingoji]

Furman. Definitely. Even if you ignored all that the man has done for the series and focused only on his IDW run, it still blows McCarthy out of the water. Furman took risks and wasn't afraid to upset the status quo. It made for engaging, unpredictable reading. In 25 issues minus the Spotlights, he completely reinvented the way the war was fought, the roles of the individual players and even altered a few personalities and killed off some fan-favourites.
he made it so that The Prime was not the absolute authority for the Autobots, and removed any possible link to Unicron whilst at the same time making only passing reference to the existence of something which may or may not be the Matrix. All this, and Cybertron is a total uninhabitable wasteland.
In six issues, McCarthy returned us to Cybertron, focused on the obvious characters of each army, reinstated the status quo to the degree that we know what to expect from each character, and pretty much made TransFormers another part of the retro stereotype.
Thanks pal, thanks a fucking bunch.

[Shockprowl]

Notch up another for the Furman camp, m'lado!

(ie me)

[primenova]

Lets compare there first page of work.

Simon Furman - page starting with head shot of Megatron talking to troops/having a go at Starscream again.

The other guy - ?

[blueshift]

Yeah, but Mr Furman then went off into very new areas rather than retreading old ground.

That's not to say McCarthy's /bad/ per se. He's slow, he seems to love decompression, he is soldily targetting his work on those who are 'G1 season 1&2 purists' it seems. I feel like I've read AHM a hundred times before, but then again it probably isn't targetted at me.

[charlesrocketboy]

Mar 6, 2009 11:19:30 GMT primenova said:

The other guy - ?

Page of four flashbacks explaining the plot.

Which is not a bad thing to have, but Evil Villain Screaming At YOU is a more immediately engaging image.

[Nigel]

I don't think it's valid to make a direct comparison as the markets and target audiences are so different.

Marvel UK output was aimed at young children who were discovering Transformers for the first time; IDW output is aimed at adults and older teenagers, a readership already familiar with the brand. The Marvel comic was intended to support the toy line, whilst now the IDW comic arguably isn't. Storytelling in comics now is different to twenty five years ago and also a weekly format possibly has different requirements to a monthly format. Even cultural differences in the UK and USA could have an impact.

That said, I'm enjoying All Hail Megatron but Dinobot Hunt is my all-time favourite Transformers story.

[blueshift]

Mar 6, 2009 18:00:46 GMT Nigel said:

I don't think it's valid to make a direct comparison as the markets and target audiences are so different.

Marvel UK output was aimed at young children who were discovering Transformers for the first time; IDW output is aimed at adults and older teenagers, a readership already familiar with the brand. The Marvel comic was intended to support the toy line, whilst now the IDW comic arguably isn't. Storytelling in comics now is different to twenty five years ago and also a weekly format possibly has different requirements to a monthly format. Even cultural differences in the UK and USA could have an impact.

That said, I'm enjoying All Hail Megatron but Dinobot Hunt is my all-time favourite Transformers story.

Honestly to me that makes Furman's early stuff even more impressive. He was writing a lowbrow children's comic squarely aimed at a young demographic and monitored carefully by Hasbro whose primary desire was to sell toys. Nowadays IDW can pretty much do what they want at an adult, mature level.

[Andy Turnbull]

I can't agree with you there Nigel.

Storytelling in comics isn't all that different, sure we've added decompressed written for the trade material, which when done right is spot on - Warren Ellis/Bryan Hitch - The Authority being one of the best examples. But there are still writers doing a more substantial read with a monthly comic. It can be done and more importantly should.

Good storytelling is good storytelling and let's face it we've dogpiled on Simon when he deserved - the Beast Wars minis, the Panini Armada title. Yes, you can argue that the presentation of a fortnightly/weekly comic is going to have some bearing on the format but let's not forget that the criticisms that have been levelled against McCarthy primarily are that he hasn't been able to do anything with his expanded page count. He's been unable to give us a series with any real substantive scope to it. The Decepticons have conquered Earth, no wait New York. I mean come on!!!! Furman and Senior gave us more dramatic impetus in less than a page when they had Jhiaxus nuke San Fran from orbit.

We've got characters going back to their sunbowisms which we need like a hole in the head all under the guise of a change of direction which to me seems nothing short of let's wax masturbatory over the sunbow cartoon.

I must digress for a moment.

DEAR INTERNET.

THE SUNBOW CARTOON ALREADY EXISTS IF YOU LIKE IT PLEASE WATCH THE DVD'S I HAVE NO NEED TO SEE IT REHASHED AND REGURGITATED IN A COMIC SERIES TWENTY YEARS LATER.

ESPECIALLY A SERIES THAT HAS TAKEN GREAT PAINS TO MOVE FAR AWAY FROM PREVIOUSLY ESTABLISHED TROPES.

THANK YOU.

Whew, I needed to say that.

As for cultural differences, Shane McCarthy is australian!

Andy

[blueshift]

I do think that Furman works best when under a lot of pressure. Heck I think Spotlight: Sideswipe reached near-greatness, but it was just a bit /too/ compressed.

But in the 80s, he had, in 11 pages to both recap, resolve a cliffhanger, move the story forwards and end on a high note. Not easy!

Here's some of my picks.

Wrath of Grimlock

Whilst not one of my favourites, it had a corker of a first page! Time! Time! TIME!

Icarus Theory 2

How good is this recap. I mean, how /good/ is this! It is almost poetry. And it is done in an interesting, dynamic, experimental way.

I'd also like to post Action Force 26 (am I allowed to do that? Its never been reprinted and god knows if it will be ever). In five pages Mr Furman writes a crossover, recap, story progression, multiple character development, cliffhanger, and its bloody brilliant, on a technical and dramatic level. I know this it a bit like preaching to the choir, but when he is on form, Mr Furman is in a league of his own (I would say in the whole comic echelon, Mr Morrison and Mr Ellis can beat him, but hey, they don't write Transformers). And it annoys me when people criticise him because 'hurr he writes space epics where everyone talks the same' because that really isn't true.

[Nigel]

Mar 6, 2009 18:31:46 GMT Andy Turnbull said:

As for cultural differences, Shane McCarthy is australian!

Ooh, I didn't know that. It's nice to see a wider range of nationalities having a hand in things. By cultural differences, I meant more the readership and the market than the writers, but, yeah, that does put a bit of a different complexion on things.

What I was trying to saying, not very well perhaps, was that I don't think you can necessarily say that one is a better writer than the other without looking at the context of their work - who they were writing for, when they were writing, the constraints they were under, general factors in the industry, etc. It's a bit like comparing a current CGI-heavy film with the original King Kong - in a direct comparison the effects in King Kong would be laughable but in context, King Kong is miles ahead of most current effects films.

That doesn't mean I don't think Furman is a better writer. (I do think he's a better writer.) I just don't think think a direct comparison is fair.

[blueshift]

I would happily say that if you remove all context and just do a direct comparison, Early Furman is still better than Early McCarthy by leaps and bounds.

[Nigel]

[charlesrocketboy]

Mar 6, 2009 18:57:50 GMT blueshift said:

I'd also like to post Action Force 26 (am I allowed to do that? Its never been reprinted and god knows if it will be ever). In five pages Mr Furman writes a crossover, recap, story progression, multiple character development, cliffhanger, and its bloody brilliant, on a technical and dramatic level.

That really is a great use of five pages.

[Grand Moff Muffin]

I don't know who this McCarthy is and haven't read any of his work, so I'm not answering the main point of this thread. However, as far as recaps are concerned, when the Marvel US comics were split across two issues of Marvel UK they just stuck a small-font text box at the start of the second part, and I found that perfectly adequate for information purposes.

Using the comic strip itself for recaps is only justified if it serves some higher artistic purpose (as in Wrath and Icarus Theory, where it was there to crank up the tension more than to convey information).

That Geoff Senior AF crossover work looks incredibly poor compared with Barry Kitson's. At least, it doesn't look like a lot of time and care has gone into it (though it is perfectly adequate). The inferior colouring doesn't help.

Martin

[Kingoji]

I just want to address something stated a little earlier on about TFUK being aimed squarely at a younger audience... This is not really the case as far as the writing is concerned, because Simon Furman himself has said (I think it was on the DVD release of the movie which was released with the poster art as the cover) that he did not write for kids. He simply wrote stories that he wanted to tell in a manner which was accessible to everyone who picked it up. Basically he wrote what he'd want to read as a guy in his mid twenties, and that's why it's always so well recieved and fondly remembered.

[blueshift]

Well we know what happens when Furman has to actually write /down/ to a young audience (hello Panini Armada)

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Well I liked Furman's stories best when I was a kid but Budiansky's more as an adult, mainly because Bob gave me more words to read per page, and also because he treated his TFs more as alien robots than normal comic characters. No-one would dispute that Furman put more emphasis on spectacle than his 1980s Amercican counterpart and that his stories were quicker reads. But that doesn't make his stories inferior - just depends what you're after.

Martin

[The Doctor]

Mar 6, 2009 18:31:46 GMT Andy Turnbull said:

DEAR INTERNET.

THE SUNBOW CARTOON ALREADY EXISTS IF YOU LIKE IT PLEASE WATCH THE DVD'S I HAVE NO NEED TO SEE IT REHASHED AND REGURGITATED IN A COMIC SERIES TWENTY YEARS LATER.

ESPECIALLY A SERIES THAT HAS TAKEN GREAT PAINS TO MOVE FAR AWAY FROM PREVIOUSLY ESTABLISHED TROPES.

THANK YOU.

Whew, I needed to say that.

Andy

It's not even a good cartoon homage though. I don't think that back in the day that the kids would have been interested in a robot warrior cartoon in which the good guys spend 8 episodes in a row sitting on their bums and doing fuck all!

-Ralph