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Story by Dwight Jon Zimmerman
Art by Charles Nicholas and Phil Lord

This book was published by Marvel Books with a copyright of 1984. ISBN 0-87135-011-4.

The scans!

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

These scans were made by me, Steve-o.

Summary:

After just four pages of character introductions, Megatron orders his troops to "patrol every inch of the earth" looking for a factory where they can produce an army of new Decepticons. Laserbeak spots a car plant and mistakenly concludes that the Autobots are already enacting their a factory-built-army plan of their own. Bumblebee and Mirage, who are out spying, overhear Laserbeak telling Megatron about it.

The Autobots use this error to deisgn a trap: a giant hole that Mirage creates an illusion of a factory over. The Decepticons narrowly avoid falling into the hole, a big fight ensues, and the Autobots win.

General observations:

The most obvious and bizarre thing about this book is that all of the Autobots other than Prime are drawn in completely unique generic robot bodies that show basically no sign of even being Transformers. Bumblebee's chest looks a bit like a VW Beetle's hood, but that's the extent of it. The vehicle modes for the Autobots, though, are all accurately-drawn based on their toys, including the super-deformed proportions on the mini-cars. (Those toys were originally designed to mimic Choro-Q / Penny Racer toys, which were similarly cutesy.)

This suggests that the artists had access to photos of the Autobots' vehicle modes, but no reference of any kind for their robot modes. Again--other than Prime! For Prime they apparently had robot mode model sheets, including back views. Usually when the model sheets aren't used for a product, the art is clearly based on either the toys or their box art instead, so these designs that were made up whole-cloth are extremely unusual.

Despite the extremely odd character models, this book has some of the most-professional, skilled, and consistent artwork of ANY of the G1 coloring books. It is really, really solid and carefully-drawn. It's clear that the art team had fully-developed reference for their unique/made-up Autobot designs, allowing them to remain recognizable from many angles and in different poses.

There are zero humans in this book! It's all robots and forest animals.

Large portions of this book were basically copied for another coloring book, Forest Rescue Mission, so you may wish to take a look at that page as well!

Specific story notes:

• As in Search for Treasure Under the Sea before it, also by Zimmerman, the idea of using a factory to build a Transformer army is central to the plot of this book.
• Soundwave makes no appearance, even though Ravage and Laserbeak are featured prominently and Soundwave's character design was among the first to be completed. (It was done in the same wave as the Decepticons who DO appear.)
• Ravage and Laserbeak both speak like any other Transformer, making this story more G1 comic-like than G1 cartoon-like.
• Mirage uses an illusion-making ability similar to his tech-spec description. Later in the franchise, this sort of power would be relegated to Hound, with Mirage gaining invisibility instead.
• Megatron is very incensed about the Autobots trying to trap them in a big hole. Did he forget that most of his army can fly?
• There's a connect-the-dots page when Ratchet needs to repair/reassemble Mirage after he's hurt by Ravage. The text on the page says you're connecting the dots "to see what Mirage looks like now", but I sort of wish it was more like, "Connect the dots to help Ratchet put Mirage back together." Missed opportunity! Hire me to write your coloring/activity books, is what I'm saying.
• Bumblebee uses an "electric net" to catch Laserbeak, and Mirage assaults Ravage with "electric balls". BB's net could easily enough have been a random piece of equipment, but Mirage seems to be shooting fireballs out of his fingertips. Ravage goes out of his way to explain that they hurt, too, so they aren't just an illusion.
• Prime literally tosses Megatron and Skywarp into outer space.
• As usual with Zimmerman's books, he explicitly refers to personality traits and abilities from from their tech specs. So even though some of the model sheets were missing, he wrote this with access to the bios.

Art/production notes:

• The Autobot designs are VERY WEIRD, as noted above in the "general observations". These designs appear again on a single page of Summertime Coloring Book.
• Skywarp's alternate head makes a subtle later appearance in Forest Rescue Mission, which--as mentioned above--duplicates entire pages of this book, albeit mostly with updated models.
• On the Decepticon side, everyone is drawn quite accurately with one interesting enhancement: the three jets are given slightly different designs, including distinct heads, to allow readers to distinguish between them (and color them properly!) in both jet and robot modes. The standard model is assigned to Starscream, with TC and SW getting the variations. I edited together the comparison picture below from a page with a matching activity.
• Later in this book, you can tell that the jets have slightly different torsos and legs as well! They're usually obscured or out of frame, but that's an impressive level of dedication.
• When Ravage goes to check "the jungle" for factories, he apparently grows to be positively titanic, probably even taller than Devastator. Later he is normal-sized again.
• I had a copy of this book when I was a kid, and all through my life, this ridiculous picture of not-Huffer crushing SS and TC has remained one of my most vivid TF memories. The picture was later redrawn with the standard designs by Frank Springer in A Message From Outer Space.







• Mirage's vehicle mode appears twice, and depicts the toy nicely on the "matching" activity page, but the driver's seat is placed WAY too far forward during the story.
• According to the ISBN sequence, this is the third of four coloring books with 1984 copyrights. I imagine they were produced by having Zimmerman write their scripts, and then farming them out to different art teams in parallel. There are no artist overlaps among these four books, although admittedly The Deadly Fuel Shortage doesn't give and art or writing credit inside. Somehow, as described above, Nicholas and Lord must not have received any robot reference for the Autobots (other than Prime) even though the artists for the other books did.