Hi-Q wrote:As much nostalgia as I feel for the G1 cartoon, I dismiss it completely when I think of TF cannon.
I do think of IDW only because they were the first and only people for a long time that took the TF origins seriously and fleshed out a real backstory.
The High Moon games and the Prime TV series both adapted most if not all of that history as well, which is why I consider it widely accepted cannon.
Well...no, actually. On two fronts: G1 is always canon, to G1, at least. There is no one canon for Transformers, so something can only be non-canon if it's heavily contradicted by a work it's supposed to be related to. (A lot of the tie-in stuff for the movies, for instance)
Second, the idea of Megatron going from Gladiator to conqueror is from the G1 Marvel comics, along with the concept of Primus. The idea of the Original 13 dates between '03 to '04, during the Dreamwave era. IDW didn't really add anything new to the origin story, though it stands to reason that Simon Furman, who also pretty much ran IDW's Transformers comics, also came up with the vast majority of the mythos as we know it today.