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I'm missing the rear cover for this book. Please get in touch with me if you can help!

Written by Dwight Jon Zimmerman
Art by Brad Joyce

This book was published by Marvel Books with a copyright of 1985. ISBN 0-87135-037-8.

The scans!

View the scans as... a single web page, a CBR archive, or a PDF.

These scans were contributed by Derik Smith.

Summary:

This book starts out with a few pages of character introductions, and then jumps into the story. The Decepticons are walking through a forest when suddenly Megatron declares it to be "the day of the Decepticons". He orders his troops to patrol the Earth and find a spot they can use to make a new army. As soon as they've flown off, he decides the forest they are already standing in will be perfect, so his remaining troops start uprooting and shooting at trees.

At the same time, the Autobots are on vacation--seriously--in the same forest. While driving around, Hound finds the Decepticons and alerts Optimus, who leads his forces off to stop the Decepticons from ruining the woodland. There's a big fight. Hound uses his Trick Light to make Megatron think he is about to catch the Witwickys. Once he's unable to pick up the humans, Megatron declares that his plans have been foiled and calls for retreat.

Afterwards, the Autobots "fix" the blasted and charred forest, making it just like new again???

General observations:

Large portions of this book are basically a remake of Decepticon Patrol. A lot of the text is identical or very-similar, and many of the pictures are redrawn from D.P. as well, down to an alternate seeker head that appears in one picture. Several pictures are also sourced from the earliest issues of the Marvel TF comic. In all these cases, though, the art has clearly been drawn fresh using the other art for layouts and poses--not "traced" or copied directly.

The redone art typically uses up-to-date character models, including the "new" cube-head Bumblebee model seen in the other 1985 coloring books, which replaced the toy/boxart-based Bees seen in the '84 books. (The Decepticon Patrol Skywarp head does show up in one page, though.) Like the other coloring book drawn by Brad Joyce (Battle at Oil Valley), the art here has unusually thick outlines around the characters.

To be a little more specific: Forest Rescue Mission starts out almost identicallly to Decepticon Patrol, except that Megatron is looking for "a spot" to make an army instead of factories. In DP, Laserbeak finds a car factory, thinks it's an Autobot factory, and then the Autobots use that misunderstanding to set a trap for the Decepticons. In FRM, Megatron simply decides to tear down a forest and build his own factory, and the Autobots happen to be in that forest already. In DP, Mirage makes an illusion but in FRM Hound makes an illusion. During the big fight, both books have a matching sequence with Bumblebee using an electrified net on Laserbeak, but otherwise the fights are different.

Below is a sampling of matched pages between the two books, always with DP on the left and FRM on the right. This isn't everything! I've noticed 15 in total, and will leave it as an exercise for the reader to find them.

Lastly: It's very weird to me that this book, with an 1985 copyright, has so many vestiges of the brand's early developmental period and so many signs of limited reference material for the artists. None of the '85 coloring books feature new characters from 1985, or even the Constructicons and Dinobots, who were all introduced during the first season of the cartoon. It's possible that the parallel development of the '84 and '85 coloring books was started all at roughly the same time (or in two very closely-scheduled batches) and their releases were simply staggered out over a longer period, rather than being developed in two distinct batches. The coloring books from 1986 were developed based on early TF:TM information and include those new characters, as well as those from 1985.

Specific story notes:

• Sparkplug's son is referred to exclusively as Butch, and is drawn as Buster. Butch was a development name for Buster, and then of course Buster was later changed to Spike between the comic and cartoon development periods.
• According to the narration, Megatron "loves to smash things with his fists!" This is driven home by an image of him punching a tree.
• Page 7 gives us the dubious information that "Ravage and Starscream love to follow Megatron's every order!"
• In a moment akin to Magnus's "Fight or Flee" line, "I've never seen anything this beautiful in the entire galaxy. Alright, give me the bomb." (YouTube link), Megatron marvels at the beautiful wilderness on one page and then on the next says "It's a great place to build a Decepticon factory. Get rid of all these stupid trees!"
• When Hound arrives to tell the Autobots about the Decepticons' actions, Optimus Prime is in the midst of feeding a titanic carrot to a rabbit. The rabbit, incongruously, seems to have arrived directly out of a Disney or Looney Tunes cartoon.
• Hound uses something like a hologram, as he does in the cartoon series, except he calls it a "Trick Light" and describes it in a way that sounds a little like the tech spec description of Mirage's ability (i.e., making things appear where they aren't).
• The Build-An-Army plan comes up in several of Zimmerman's coloring books, but it's unusually thin this time around. The entire thing is this: tear up the forest so they can build a factory there. The Autobots stop them from tearing up the forest, and Megatron shouts, "The Autobots stopped my plans, but they won't stop me from getting away!"

Art/production notes:

• The intro pages not only show Bumblebee as equal in height to Hound, but both of them tower over the trees of the forest. Prime's intro page also makes him look gargantuan, but arguably the trees on his page are far away.
• Megatron has a big thought balloon where he imagines the factory and army he wants to build. Streaming out are a bunch of generic robots, lead by Soundave and Rumble/Frenzy... although both of them have incorrect chests, and Rumble/Frenzy is shown with a visor instead of discrete eyes.
• Megatron's cannon-blast on page 25 seems to be based on a panel from issue 1 of the comic, although the perspective has been, um, "enhanced" in a style that would make Pat Lee proud.
• Upon being interrupted in his forest-wrecking and knocked down, Megatron appears to have a tantrum on the ground as he orders the Decepticons to retaliate.







• On page 29, as the Decepticons approach, Megatron is flanked by two robots who basically have Soundave's and Starscream's heads... but their torsos are again off-model, and Starscream (or whatever jet) doesn't even have his big shoulder things, making him almost unrecognizable. (His legs do look like jet legs, though.)
• When Prime's Combat Deck makes an appearance, it's drawn as a copy of the panel from issue 1 of the Marvel comic showing Prime's Cybertronian mode!