AllNewSuperRobot wrote:To what end? What does a fan of today who, for example, jumped on to Transformers through the award winning Beast Wars or Transformers Prime, let alone the pinnacle of IDWverse (IMO) Last Stand of The Wreckers, gain by reading the Marvel run?
Allow
me to step in and answer this, speaking as one who entered this brand via Beast Wars and never got to read the Marvel run until he was 20-21.
As a young teen in the early 2000s, I was very much hyped up about all things Transformers and couldn't get enough of it. I wanted to absorb as much fiction as a I possibly could, though at the time I was also under the misconception that only the television/film-based works were what mattered since I had had zero exposure to any Transformers comics as a kid and up to that point as a teen.
So because I wanted to take in as much motion picture media as I could, I had already gotten through Beast Wars and Beast Machines and found myself wanting more. At the time, Kid Rhino was putting the G1, Beast Wars, Beast Machines, and Armada cartoons out on DVD, so I scooped all of those up without hesitation (RiD 2001 was--and still is--in Disney rights limbo at the time). And come 2004, Cartoon Network started airing Energon on Toonami (I was a dumb kid, so I was completely oblivious to most of that show's shortcomings).
I had also taken to getting Transformers news from fansites on the Internet at the time as well, around which point I'd discovered a few things that I'd never known about before. One of these things was the
Transformers: The Ultimate Guide book publishing by Dorling Kindersley. Once I learned of its release date, I headed over the my local Borders (R.I.P.) and bought it. Reading that book fascinated me with what its contents detailed, as my ignorant brain initially thought it all pertained to the cartoon universes, until I later learned that most of its pages for the G1, Armada, and Energon sections were more specifically talking about the Marvel and Dreamwave comics (more correctly, the Dreamwave universes but with influences from Marvel).
I had never read any of the Marvel (or Dreamwave) comics, but what I'd learned about the Marvel run from both that book and on the early Transformers fansites of the 2000s intrigued me to no end. Especially the whole Primus and Unicron origin story that blew my blossoming adolescent mind way more than the cartoon's Quintesson origin did. I wanted to experience what these stories I'd heard about were talking about. I wanted to see the Dinobot Hunt, the Time Wars, the Megatron vs. Galvatron fights, The Legacy of Unicron, the Matrix Quest, the cult of Unicron, the Primus vs. Unicron fight, ALL of it!
And while I came to enjoy other new things as the years went on, I never stopped wanting to read the Marvel run, as my interest in reading it continued to linger in the back of my mind. It would not be until 2010-2011 that I finally got to read EVERYTHING from the Marvel run: US, UK, G1, G2, G.I. Joe crossovers, even Alignment! And while the US stories started to dull out around the middle of the run, the good parts were good enough to make me regret none of it. You ask what one who wasn't there for the original run gets out of going back to those old Marvel stories without the nostalgia for them to back them up? Well,
I wasn't there, and what
I got out of those old Marvel stories was:
- The best version of Ratchet ever
- The best version of Shockwave ever
- The best "Unicron attacks Cybertron" story ever
- One of the most hardcore depictions of Galvatron ever (and I don't mean Galvatron II)
- The first Soundwave to ever make me even give a darn about him (in the UK comics only)
- An awesome version of Blaster
- A Grimlock who was both different from his cartoon counterpart and (when not being a bombastic bully) had a degree of intrigue and depth to his character (this was before RID 2015 came along and gave us its FUN Grimlock)
- Awesome Decepticon leaders who weren't Megatron/Galvatron: the aforementioned Shockwave, plus Ratbat, Scorponok, Thunderwing, and Bludgeon
- Storytelling that, even at its worst, kept things going in a way that showed how nearly each and every issue mattered to some extent in the long run of the series's ongoing narrative, as opposed to the cartoon's majority of filler episodes of rather pedestrian-by-comparison plots that could be skipped over due to how little overarching narrative the show had
- Memorial character development for a good number of standout roles amid a sea of toys needing to be advertised (granted, this is not a concept unique to Marvel TF, but it's still noteworthy)
- And on the whole, among many more things, a long-running substantial series of events that tonally felt more inline with the tones of Beast Wars and Beast Machines than the cartoon ever did, which was very poignant to me for how much I love the Beast Era ('course, this isn't to say that I subscribe to the notion of the Marvel comics, instead of the cartoon, being the G1 past of the Beast Era, no, I know good and well that the Beast Era's G1 is a mixture of cartoon/comic elements and is meant to be treated like Arthurian Legends rather than as literal history, with the exception of the contrary being the case for the Japanese Beast Era since the cartoons are absolutely the literal history of that version of the Beast Era, but I digress).
when animated characters started looking like Michael Bay stuff. You think they're ready for entirely new stories and characters that push them outside their comfort zone? 
, were some of his favorites, but he had managed to watch the entirety of everything in animation in less than a year. (and I mean EVERYTHING including BW II & Neo etc...) . So no, I don't consider it ever a daunting task or chore to go back and appreciate *what came first* from any franchise I take a passive or immense interest in. however I know he is a unique case, most kids' parents probably don't have access to all of it.
why can't the rest of the Internet discuss like this?
