Sunstreaker: A great character- wasted?

[Shockprowl]

Where he go? FUBAR'ed by Shockwave early doors and then that's it- until the battle on the Moon/Perchance to Dream era. I've been getting into the character of late, and I think Marvel wasted a great character there. Yes, wasted! Sunstreaker stands above the crack (?) between Heroic Freedom Fighter, and Egotistical Violence Junkie, depending on what you read. It's a fascinating character dynamic.

Wha say you, Cyber Chumbs?

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Don't forget State Games - chronologically the first Autobot named in the Marvel TF universe - and first to get beaten up by Megatron!

He shows how tough he is in US issue #3 'Prisoner of War' when he shoots down Skywarp and declares himself "Cybertron's greatest warrior" - a title that he then has to defend in the fan collaboration 'Decepti-Kombat'...

Martin

[grahamthomson]

Poor Sunstreaker.

But then, a lot of the original Autobots and Decepticons never got much in the way of characterisation.

(As far as IDW goes, I really liked what Furman did with Sunstreaker.)

[Nigel]

It was the nature of the Marvel comic - which really existed mainly to advertise new toys - that most characters could never achieve their full potential. Old characters like Sunstreaker had to be put aside to make way for new. It wasn't a matter of Marvel wasting characters but that Hasbro's demands made it necessary to use others. (Demands that weren't unreasonable from a business point of view, of course.) Fortunately from a storytelling perspective, by the time Furman took over the US scripts, the toys were in decline and Hasbro would come to demand less of Marvel, resulting in interesting stories and characterisation. Also at that time, sidelined characters like Sunstreaker were making a comeback as toys through Pretenders, Actionmasters and Classics, so story and business were converging and the characters could be fleshed out more.

Freed of the constraints of pushing new toys, Dreamwave and especially IDW have been able to do interesting things with "minor" characters and use them more effectively than Marvel.

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Aug 25, 2010 10:46:40 GMT Nigel said:

It was the nature of the Marvel comic - which really existed mainly to advertise new toys - that most characters could never achieve their full potential.

Very true - though I don't know if they couldn't have sold more toys if they'd given guys like Sunstreaker more story and toyshop shelf time. I mean, how many kids had actually had enough birthdays and pocket money to collect the entire 1984 range by the time it was withdrawn from the shelves and replaced by the 1985 and then 1986 range? If Sunstreaker had been one of the main stars of the animated movie, his toy could have kept on selling.

Freed of the constraints of pushing new toys, Dreamwave and especially IDW have been able to do interesting things with "minor" characters and use them more effectively than Marvel.

I think that's an oversimplification of things. Of the Marvel stories, the more inventive and quirky stories with the most interesting characters - albeit many of them human - were written by Bob B, the guy with Hasbro breathing down his neck and making him change his cast of robots every other month. He managed this by fitting an extraordinary amount of story into each 22-page issue. Simon Furman meanwhile had very few robot casting constraints and focussed a lot on characters that weren't even for sale in the UK, such as Swoop and the Predacons, or characters no longer for sale such as Ultra Magnus and Galvatron. But his stories were less inventive and original in their ideas and characters than those of his US counterpart.

The way I see it, Bob could develop a character like Huffer, Skids, Scrounge or the Battlechargers more in 22 pages and make them more unique and special as characters than Furman ever made Springer, Death's Head or Galvatron, over a sprawling space-time apocalypse arc. Sometimes constraints lead to more being done in the limited time allowed.

Martin

[Nigel]

Aug 25, 2010 11:07:26 GMT Grand Moff Muffin said:

Freed of the constraints of pushing new toys, Dreamwave and especially IDW have been able to do interesting things with "minor" characters and use them more effectively than Marvel.

I think that's an oversimplification of things.

Yes, it is, sorry. I didn't mean to suggest it was the case all or even much of the time, but rather that modern comics have been able to use particular characters effectively.

[primenova]

Sunstreaker & Sideswipe only really got there time in #3 as stated above. Then when Sunstreaker was one of the ones who had his power drained in #4 for the final battle - but Sideswipe was broguht back - see him at end of Target 2006. Sunstreaker turned up on the Moon mainly because the US artist just drew anyone in the background to fill space - so we had Broadside in there too.

At least Simon used him in Earthforce - but without Sideswipe.

"Who's Galvatron?"

[jameso]

Can a character really be considered a _great_ character if he's sorely underused? Isn't that more speculation that he might have been a great character.

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Aug 25, 2010 18:38:52 GMT jameso said:

Can a character really be considered a _great_ character if he's sorely underused?

Yes, in theory. A character could have a TF Universe entry that makes him a great character that deserves to have numerous stories written about him.

In Sunstreaker's case, I don't think his Universe entry ( www.ntfa.net/universe/english/index.php?act=view&char=Sunstreaker ) itself is enough to call the character great.

Some characters have pretty great Universe entries, though they've never been fleshed out in stories. Take Tailgate, for instance:

www.ntfa.net/universe/english/index.php?act=view&char=Tailgate

What a fascinating guy - and not someone you're likely to meet in your average superhero comic book.

One thing isn't in doubt in my mind - the collective entirety of all those Universe entries taken together, without any stories to back them up, is a greater work of imagination than any actual Transformers story - and acquaints us intimately with a great fictional species.

Martin

[Rich]

OT: I've always found the TF sympathy for other machines fairly daft: they all carry blasters, but you don't hear them screaming 'equal rights and fair pay for ion cannons' when they first arrive on Earth. So, while the Tailgate entry is kind of amusing, it's silly-amusing rather than particularly clever or insightful IMO.

[Grand Moff Muffin]

Aug 25, 2010 19:13:17 GMT Rich said:

OT: I've always found the TF sympathy for other machines fairly daft: they all carry blasters, but you don't hear them screaming 'equal rights and fair pay for ion cannons' when they first arrive on Earth. So, while the Tailgate entry is kind of amusing, it's silly-amusing rather than particularly clever or insightful IMO.

Well, it is written as if Tailgate's not quite right in the head, and I just picked it at random as a more interesting entry than Sunstreaker's.

On the other hand, I can imagine a situation where we get to the point where we find it acceptable for humans to use non-sentient genetically engineered biotechnology but where we would be uncomfortable finding biotechnology exploited by an entirely metal and non-biological race of robots. It's kind of the reverse of that situation, I suppose.

To give credit where I suspect it's due, I'm guessing Bob B wrote Tailgate's character after reading Brawn in 'The Enemy Within'.

Martin