The Smelting Pool

The smelting pool is a pit of molten alloy in the Polyhex province, sited beside the fortress Darkmount, and its function is disposal. Straxus, the Decepticon governor, uses it to execute prisoners, dissidents, failures and anyone whose continued existence is administratively inconvenient. Transformers are lowered in or thrown in, and the comic does not cut away.

Its appearance in The Transformers #17, titled The Smelting Pool!, is the moment Marvel's Transformers comic declared what it was going to be. Published in a line of toy tie-ins, it opens with a scene of industrialised execution presided over by a villain who delivers a lecture on efficiency while doing it. The issue also introduces the Autobot resistance cell operating in Polyhex and sets up the space bridge story that follows immediately in issue 18.

The pool's importance is tonal more than geographical. It gives the Marvel continuity a texture the cartoon never had: an occupation with a bureaucracy, a governor with a body count, and consequences that stick. Straxus is a genuinely frightening antagonist in a way that the cartoon's Megatron, who loses every week and is mocked by his own air commander, structurally cannot be. Everything grim about Marvel's Cybertron traces back to this one location, and none of it exists on screen.

• The Smelting Pool! is routinely named by fans as the issue that proved the Marvel comic was not a toy advertisement.
• Straxus was created by Simon Furman and Bob Budiansky's editorial line, and became the template for the comics' brutal Cybertronian villains.
• The pool has no cartoon equivalent whatsoever; the closest the show gets is Megatron threatening to melt someone down.
• The issue's Autobot viewpoint character, Scrounge, dies, which was still unusual for the line in 1986.