The Transformers #113
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeThe Transformers (Marvel UK) #113 is the debut of Death's Head — the robotic 'Freelance Peacekeeping Agent' who would grow from a throwaway Transformers supporting character into one of Marvel UK's signature original creations, eventually crossing into the main Marvel Universe via Doctor Who Magazine, Dragon's Claws, Fantastic Four, and his own solo series. The issue also opens the 'Wanted: Galvatron — Dead or Alive!' arc, the first major Marvel Transformers story set substantially on a planet outside Earth or Cybertron, giving the UK series a more expansive, science-fiction register distinct from its American counterpart. Its cultural afterlife is unusually well-documented: celebrated Transformers writer James Roberts has stated it was the first issue of the comic he ever bought, and as a professional he embedded the number 113 so pervasively across his own stories that fans and wikis track every instance as an explicit tribute. For a licensed toy comic, it generated a character — and an editorial approach — that outlasted the licence itself.
In "The Coming of the Inhumanoids! (part 3) The Battle Down Below!", Earth Corps dives beneath the surface to escape Tendril’s assault, only to face a new threat from D'Compose and his twisted creations. With help from the ancient Granites and the mysterious Redlen, they regroup on the surface—only to confront political betrayal when Senator Masterson cuts their funding. Sandra Shore, sister to the corrupt Blackthorne Shore, steps in with a bold new alliance, equipping the team with weapons and donning a suit of her own. As they plunge back underground, they’re met with a horrifying new menace: D'Compose’s mutated Deathbats, unleashed to crush the heroes in the dark.
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Simon Furman, who had taken over as both writer and editor of the UK Transformers weekly, conceived Death's Head as a disposable single-arc bounty hunter commissioned to hunt Galvatron for Rodimus Prime. When artist Geoff Senior returned designs far exceeding that brief — a horned, skull-faced mechanoid crackling with sardonic personality — Furman went back and rewrote the character's entire dialogue to match, creating the trademark verbal tic ('yes?') and the insistence on being called a 'Freelance Peacekeeping Agent' rather than a bounty hunter. Because any character originating in a Hasbro-licensed title was vulnerable to being absorbed into that company's copyright, Marvel UK hastily produced a one-page strip called 'High Noon Tex' (drawn by a then-teenage Bryan Hitch, who would later achieve fame on The Ultimates) to establish Marvel's independent ownership of the character before the Transformers appearance could be used against them; due to legal timing, that strip did not actually circulate until 1988, a year after this issue.
Trivia · 8 facts
- First appearance of Death's Head (Marvel UK) as a character in a published comic, in the story 'Wanted: Galvatron — Dead or Alive!' Part 1 (cover date May 1987, on sale 9 May 1987 in the UK).
- Written by Simon Furman, pencilled and inked by Geoff Senior, coloured by Steve White, lettered by Annie Parkhouse (Halfacree), and edited by Ian Rimmer; cover art also by Geoff Senior.
- Death's Head was originally conceived as a single-story throwaway character; Geoff Senior's unexpectedly vivid design caused Furman to rework the scripts, effectively co-creating the character's voice and personality in response to the art.
- To prevent Hasbro claiming ownership of Death's Head under the Transformers licence terms, Marvel UK produced a one-page ashcan strip called 'High Noon Tex' (writer: Furman; artist: Bryan Hitch) — the same legal workaround used earlier for Circuit Breaker in the US series.
- The story opens on the alien planet Elpasos, the first Marvel Transformers tale set partially on a world other than Earth or Cybertron, broadening the sci-fi scope of the UK continuity.
- The issue carries a backup strip reprinting pages 12–17 of The Inhumanoids #3 (Marvel US, May 1987), part of a four-issue serialisation spread across Transformers (UK) #111–114.
- The 'Wanted: Galvatron — Dead or Alive!' arc that opens here ran through issues #113–120 and concluded in the 1987 Transformers Annual ('Vicious Circle!'), and was later reprinted in Titan Books' Fallen Angel collection (2002) and IDW's Transformers Classics UK Volume 4 (June 2013), the latter with historical essays by James Roberts and new cover art by Andrew Wildman.
- James Roberts, who later wrote extensively for IDW's Transformers line (including More Than Meets the Eye), has publicly credited this issue as the one that made him a Transformers fan, and hid the number 113 as a recurring Easter egg across his professional work — tracked today by the Transformers Wiki as dozens of in-story references.
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↩ Reprints The Inhumanoids #3 (1987)
Reprinted in The Transformers Classics UK #4 (2013)
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