I owe everything to a man named Simon Furman.
Many years ago, I narrowly missed being at the same pub table as the lead writer of the UK Transformers comic by mere minutes. In the Sliding Doors reality where I caught a later train, the poor bastard was subject to a garbled gatling gun assault of his role in my meagre origin story, and no doubt he would never have dared leave the house again.
So I present it here instead. There are, of course, significant gaps in my memory; I retain only still-frame images, jigsawed in the decades since into a false narrative that I believe with all my heart.
It is early 1984. I am four years old. I sit by the electric heater in our family lounge, gasping out ‘A is for apple’ as my mother wearily wields picture-cards at me. Learning to read feels like the tallest mountain in the world – and, moreover, I see no reason at all to climb it.
It is late 1984 and it is early 1985 and it is everything in between. It is a sustained assault upon a young brain primed and ready to evolve away from toy farmyard animals and Stickle Bricks. A loud TV advert for a new line of toys / the boy next door brandishes a model car proudly, pulls and prods at it, and it is changed / a visit to Toymaster in Barnard’s Green and seeing racks and racks of ---
It is March 1985. I have recently turned 5, and received the red van robot named Ironhide as my birthday Transformer: my gateway drug. For all my begging, another toy is not permitted, not yet. But a comic? They want me to learn to read, after all. In Link Top News, Malvern, my fate is sealed. I suddenly have a reason to climb that mountain. A is Apple. T is for Transformers.
My introduction to the Transformers comic is Simon Furman’s own advent: a rough-edged but thoroughly filmic burst of robotic carnage named The Enemy Within, in which the heroic, Cylon-faced and clamp-handed Autobot Brawn turns unashamedly murderous after a freak electrical accident. There is rage, there is betrayal, there is even the thoughtless murder of innocent humans. A Saturday morning cartoon concept turned remarkably twisted.
Moreover, Furman puts such trust in this story’s artist, the meticulous John Ridgway, to tell stories with pictures, and it burns an immediate hole into the deepest recesses of my brain.
Few of Furman’s words are yet comprehensible to the uneducated sludge that is me, but the images recount a story loud and clear. Spaceships. Robots. Danger. Deserts. Violence. In one fell swoop, from Finger Mouse and Blue Peter to this:
I cannot believe what I am seeing. I make my parents read it to me again and again, memorising the words, asking for definitions of those I do not understand. It is clearly exhausting for them, and doubtless they worried whether I should be exposed to such scenes of aggression and wanton advertising. But seeing me learn to fly is clearly the higher priority.
It is October 1985. My first month of school has been hell: the improbably-named Miss Dixie, a harsh old teacher with an Aunt May bun and a mouth like a clenched anus, inexplicably confiscated my brand new pencil case full of colourful crayons on my first day.
On my second day, I dared to sneak an excited look at another boy’s Autobot-adorned exercise book, and he still threatens me with daily violence in consequence.
But I can read. It is remarked upon, even by the crayon-stealing tyrant, how far ahead I am of the rest of the class in this regard. The literacy lessons are thus pure tedium. “A is for apple…”
And so I escape. I day-dream of Dinobots in the snow and the severed, suffering head of Optimus Prime (a nightmarish image central to a long-running early story in the comic, albeit this one not written by Simon Furman).
But the end of the day brings the dour week’s brightest highlight: another trip to Link Top News.
I had only a few of the sixteen issues between this and Brawn’s psychotic breakdown, from which I recall only still images, occasional phrases, and nightmare flashes of beaten, broken Autobots. It’s another Furman tale that leaves the most indelible stamp.
My parents do not read this issue to me. I read it. Over and over and over and over, until the pages come loose from their staples. In truth, it is an unexceptional issue, but to see Optimus Prime himself - by now the superstar of my mindscape - take centre-stage again, after what felt an eternity relegated to a helpless severed head in the clutches of the evil Shockwave, makes it breathtaking.
Most of all, it marks the moment that the Transformers comic becomes mine, rather something filtered through a parental lens. I can read it without aid, which means my parents are released from their torment. They instead pass their responsibility entirely to Simon Furman.
They will never again see the comic’s contents. They will never know what is to come. The wild ideas, the desperate stakes, the shocking violence, the parade of death, the experimental narrative approaches… A private world all of my own, twisting, exciting, corrupting.
It is still October 1985. I successfully negotiate a standing order at Link Top News – what would become a years-long subscription to Furmanism. A guaranteed weekly hit, straight into my veins.
I write for a living now. I always have. First in criticism, now in stories for videogames. Building words, honing dialogue, doing terrible things to my characters. It’s what I am, who I have always been. Perhaps what I would always have been. But I believe, to my core, that it’s only because my parents spent 27p in March 1985.
Big fan of A is Apple T is for Transformers 😄
I could steal every word of this and publish it on my own newsletter and it would still be entirely accurate. :) I wonder how many of us were influenced by Furman's work? The Transformers comic was the first time I was introduced to long-form serial storytelling, my first proper encounter with science fiction, my first experience of characters dying in stories.
Absolutely formative stuff.