Dave's Transformers Collector Club Magazine Rant April/May 2005 I'll be going into more depth on this issue since it's the first I got from the new management. CAPSULE This isn't available except by subscription, so it's hard to give an accurate recommendation before getting the club toy, but my inclination is to say this is overpriced for anyone who has access to the internet. $40 or more (depending on location and whether you want issues to show up less than two weeks after they're mailed) for a year. If you just want the exclusive toy, you will probably be able to get it on eBay for less than $40. RANT Okay, here's the setup for the new TF Collectors' Club, as run by toy collector company Master Collector. For your money, you get six issues of the TFCC newsletter, detailed more below. You also get 12 issues of Master Collector, a tabloid-sized newsprint collectors' publication with ads for various toys and news about toy shows and occasionally other stuff. You get access to online stuff at transformersclub.com that does not yet exist in mid-April 2005. You get an exclusive recolor Transformers toy, which looks to be a mostly clear plastic version of Sky Shadow (Air Team combiner) this year. And the webpage has a list of other minor benefits I won't go into. The Master Collector newsletter is nearly worthless if you have a web browser. The ads are mostly general "I'm looking for Machine Wars toys" sort of stuff, eBay and similar online auction sites are more useful IMO. The toy show ads may or may not be useful compared to online sources of information, there aren't any toy shows in my area so I haven't really kept tabs on that. Basically, the only value the MC newsletter has to me is that it acts as a mailing wrapper for the TFCC mag. The toy has only been seen in prototype form so far, without paint apps, but it's a low-run recolor of a $7 toy, so I'd call it $16 of the membership fee, including postage. It's a good mold, and hopefully they used the Terradive tweak that keeps the head guns from falling off. So, that effectively makes the magazine cost $4 per issue, with the Master Collector tabloid and other benefits being freebies. The original quarterly OTFCC magazine struck me as costing about $5 an issue (Mega-PVC Skywarp being closer to half of the $40 membership fee), with a lot more content...although keep in mind that 3H went under. Well, now that I've analyzed the rest of the stuff and decided that I'm paying $4 an issue for the TFCC mag, let's see what I'm getting for it. The TFCC Newsletter is 16 full color pages on glossy magazine stock, slightly narrower and taller than standard comicbook size at 6.5" (17cm) wide and 10.5" (27cm) tall. It shares its staples with the MC newsletter, so you have to carefully cut through the newsprint to free the TFCC newsletter without damage. There is no "cover" per se, although I suppose you could consider the entire MC paper to be the cover. Page 1: The top half is the editorial nattering, talking about various bits of organizational business for both the club and BotCon 05 (most if not all of this info has been online for a while now). The second half is the beginning of a Frostbite review by J.E. Alvarez (the rest is supposedly available online). It's worth noting that the first sentence of the review is wrong, or at least misleading...this is NOT the last wave of Deluxe Universe toys, there's been sightings of wave 9 (including Blastcharge) recently (although none directly reached me yet, hence no listing on my sightings page). There's other errors in the review (i.e. the figure can hold its sword in the beast-head hand) and the writing style is both effusively praiseful and somewhat incoherent. Not really a good review, sadly. The lower right corner has a pseudo-table of contents, with bullet points for features inside, but no page numbers. Page 2: An interview with Hasbro designers Aaron Archer and Eric Siebenaler. I generally skip over interviews no matter what magazine I'm reading, but I read this to be thorough in my review. It's okay as such things go, although it could have used one more proofreading pass (unless there's a Lovecraftian "Dagon Megatron" I wasn't aware of). Page 3: An essay by Ben Yee about Actionmasters, including the back of package art from the AMs. If you've never heard of Actionmasters, it's reasonably informative, but it's too short to really do more than gloss over the topic. Pages 4-5: Part two of an interview with Simon Furman. The background of page 4 is a faint image of the cover of TFG1 #80, which is just dark enough to make the page a little hard to read. Anyway, the interview starts off with asking Furman what he would have done had the book not been cancelled when it was. The answer? No specific ideas, but some general elements. There's some interesting stuff, most of which will never be used, but some that he mined in War Within. Oddly, it doesn't seem to match up with the short story he once wrote set after #80, but I guess that's the difference between "what I would have done if there was no cancellation" and "what I would do with the situation the cancellation forced me to set up" in many ways. The lower right hand corner of page 5 has a not very funny cartoon that has Megatron reformatted as a Pikachu. Pages 6-7: ANOTHER interview, sigh. This time with Palisades designer Jeffry Englert. It's accompanied by some nice pictures of the War Within Prime statue (regular and battle damaged) and the Ravage mini-statue. Nothing moves me to comment further on this. Pages 8-9: A short Toyfair 2005 report with ten pictures you've probably already seen bigger and clearer online if you're interested at all. But I'm just atavistic enough to like having a hardcopy of this stuff. Captions for the toys shown out of package would have been nice, though. A list of names for the Japanese and U.S. versions of the Cybertron toys is also included, which I sppreciated for similar atavistic reasons...although it seems to contradict at least a couple of names I've seen online. Maybe the names have switched since Archer gave TFCC the list, maybe the online info is (gasp) wrong. Alvarez's prose is way too "breathless" with excessive use of exclamation points and effusive praise. Throttle back, dude. Pages 10-16: Part 2 of the new exclusive comic, with "Transformers Cybertron" as the title. But it's clearly a Universe comic, given the toy characters featured. Story by Forest Lee (who I don't know from Adam) and Dan Khanna. The colors are by "Blond", who could use some work in keeping figures distinct, but who doesn't fall into the Dreamwave Murkworks trap. The writing is...not good. Tone changes abruptly, there's poor choices of words (Primus should not be referred to as "it", for instance), and I'm generally given the impression that the script was written at 4 AM the day after the deadline. It just feels...dead. Khanna's art tells the story reasonably well, although there's more "standing around talking" than a 7 page installment really should have. Overall, it's not even in the same neighborhood as the 3H version in terms of content and quality, but it IS in the same neighborhood in terms of price. I'm sticking with it, since I'd already written off the $40 I paid for my OTFCC membership, but if you're reading this on a computer screen, you'd really be wasting your money on this unless you really just want to be able to say you're in the official TF club. I suppose some of the not-yet- available benefits (like the club store) could change my assessment, but I tend to doubt it. Dave Van Domelen, "There the remains of our lord lie, Prime. Unicron is DEAD, and we're out of a job. But even now I can sense his presence, his POWER! All he needs is a small bit of assistance to destroy Primus and reign supreme over a multiverse of unending chaos!" - Ramjet, whose madness apparently includes massive moodswings.