Issue 9, 12 January 1985.
Written by: Steve Parkhouse.
Art by: John Ridgeway.
Colours by: Gina Hart.
Letters by: Richard Starkings.
Cover art: Can't tell.
Plot: England's Stansham castle is bombed by three mysterious fighter jets (well, not mysterious to us, we know they're Decepticons). They make one small explosion and the other ends up unexploded in the ground. As the curator, Roy Harker, is summoned to the castle to deal with this, his son Sammy sees Jazz. This scares the stuffing out of him and he runs off home. Jazz follows and makes note of where he lives. When Roy hears about Sammy's encounter, he shows Sammy a picture, a drawing of a robot similar to Jazz - the 'Man of Iron' - around the local area - in the eleventh century.
International Interest: This works backwards here, but when this strip was reprinted in the US Transformers book, they didn't try to fit the continuity together at all. They just slapped a little note up the top of the first page saying it happened ages ago in a foreign comic.
Britishisms: Obviously there was none of this, thing being an original UK strip and everything, but it's interesting to see that in the US reprint, there's no similar process to turn the British spelling into the American.
Miserable glitches: Both Jazz and (presumably) Optimus Prime say that 'Jazz' is Jazz's codename. Not necessarily wrong, but we haven't heard about this 'codenames' thing before - and every other Transformer we've come across seems simply to have their name as, well, their name. (I think this was an early attempt to cope with the fact that these aliens have English words for names.)
On the US issue that reprints this story, they give us a rather bizarre cover. Medieval-types are all fighting a giant robot, presumably an attempt to recreate the Man of Iron scenario described within, only the robot is Megatron coloured blue, red and orange, with the wrong head and hands - and he doesn't even look remotely like the Man of Iron.
First appearances: Roy Harker, Sammy Harker.
Fact-file: Sideswipe.
Back-up strip: Machine Man - The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls.
Notes: For this entry, I'm using the reprint of this story in US Transformers issue 33. It was recoloured by Nel Yomtov, which by some reports was to fit in with the different color ideas the US book had ('cos, ya know, some different colours as well as a continuity jump would've just wiped out the readership). More likely, though, it's because the British and US books used completely different printing and colouring processes - the American book at this point used 'dot' colouring rather than the solid hues and gradients of their cousin across the Atlantic.
This story doesn't pick up where we left off last issue. Not at all. And nope, not the Openers pages, not the story itself, nor anywhere in the entire comic does it suggest how or when these things are taking place. By our reckoning, it takes place after issue 56, but the comic just wanted its readers to grin and bear it, which fortunately it was popular enough to stand. (Issue 21 would offer a suggestion, but it's not very helpful.)
Comments: Not bad, but not super-good either. The writer actually seems to want to do anything but include Transformers in the strip. Nor am I sure quite why they chose this story to reprint and show off to the Americans. Actually, I can take a guess. It's because this story is actually set in England, yes? I'm well aware that this is the first original British strip, but it's not exactly evocative of the series. When the American readers were demanding a look at the ever-legendary British series, no doubt they'd heard about or seen things like Target: 2006. (Which probably would have been a bit long, but there are other, shorter stories.)
What makes a nice change from every other children's story under the sun is that the kid, having seen something 'out of this world', doesn't decide to keep it from his parents, which they usually do.