Legion of Doom: Primacy # 1!

Sometimes the best stories are those before the story even began. When Dreamwave Productions still had the Transformers license, they decided to start doing comic books about what happened before the Transformers arrived on Earth. Those comics, “Transformers: The War Within,” were some of the best comics that Dreamwave ever made, featuring familiar characters in unfamiliar settings, especially the Cybertronian alt modes and old allegiances. IDW Publishing have done the same thing by introducing their own in-continuity pre-Earth stories beginning with the digital-first series “Transformers: Autocracy” in 2012, followed by “Transformers: Monstosity” the next year. In these tales set millions of years prior to the discovery of Transformers on Earth, Orion Pax (not yet Optimus Prime) and Megatron wage war in Cybetronian cities like Kaon—but the battle lines are not clearly drawn yet. At the end of “Monstrosity,” Pax and his Autobot regulars had barely succeeded in shutting down the walking Decepticon fortress Trypticon in the city of Harmonex. The rest of Cybertron is still figuring out what to make of the violence in Harmonex. At Maccadams Oil House, Hot Rod is listening to a skeptical broadcast by Blaster when he is threatened by his old friend Slinger, now a Decepticon soldier.