I'm a ginormous Transformers fan, and I admit that most of the appeal is due to nostalgia.
However, there are cartoon series such as Beast Wars which had some experienced writers on the team (the story editor, Larry DiTillio, had just come off five years of Babylon 5), and made a reasonable effort to create appealing characters and engaging storylines. The CGI animation meant a smaller cast than previous shows, so individual characters got more development, and the voice cast was absolutely stellar.
The comics have tended to go at a slower pace than the films/animation, doing more world-building and deep character analysis. They're still hit-or-miss, and there are several distinct long-running comic continuities, so it's hard to recommend a jumping-on point.
But I second the recommendation of More Than Meets the Eye/Lost Light, which goes into a lot of depth on the psychological effects of being a four-million-year-old transforming robot, what kind of society it creates, and how the characters relate to each other.
I love how they actually built something of a scifi mythos around the toy robot cartoon in Beast Wars, especially how they tied the Generation 1 world to it. They didn't really have to do that just for something made to sell toys. There were the references to the good guys doing unethical experiments and (possibly) making the bad guys second class citizens on Cybertron.
Too bad the writers never got to implement all of their ideas because of deadlines: supposedly the Vok, the aliens from Beast Wars, were going to be the origin of the Swarm from the Generation 2 comics.
I think the Vok = Swarm was a later retcon by writers of convention/magazine fanfic (which makes its canonicity dubious at best). However, it was one of the earliest points at which the writers interacted with fans via BBS's, and at least one member of the fan community was credited as a lore consultant, and helped them add more details from the original cartoon and comics. Simon Furman, who wrote most of the original Marvel run, actually wrote the S3 finale.
I'm a ginormous Transformers fan, and I admit that most of the appeal is due to nostalgia.
However, there are cartoon series such as Beast Wars which had some experienced writers on the team (the story editor, Larry DiTillio, had just come off five years of Babylon 5), and made a reasonable effort to create appealing characters and engaging storylines. The CGI animation meant a smaller cast than previous shows, so individual characters got more development, and the voice cast was absolutely stellar.
The comics have tended to go at a slower pace than the films/animation, doing more world-building and deep character analysis. They're still hit-or-miss, and there are several distinct long-running comic continuities, so it's hard to recommend a jumping-on point.
But I second the recommendation of More Than Meets the Eye/Lost Light, which goes into a lot of depth on the psychological effects of being a four-million-year-old transforming robot, what kind of society it creates, and how the characters relate to each other.
I love how they actually built something of a scifi mythos around the toy robot cartoon in Beast Wars, especially how they tied the Generation 1 world to it. They didn't really have to do that just for something made to sell toys. There were the references to the good guys doing unethical experiments and (possibly) making the bad guys second class citizens on Cybertron.
Too bad the writers never got to implement all of their ideas because of deadlines: supposedly the Vok, the aliens from Beast Wars, were going to be the origin of the Swarm from the Generation 2 comics.
I think the Vok = Swarm was a later retcon by writers of convention/magazine fanfic (which makes its canonicity dubious at best). However, it was one of the earliest points at which the writers interacted with fans via BBS's, and at least one member of the fan community was credited as a lore consultant, and helped them add more details from the original cartoon and comics. Simon Furman, who wrote most of the original Marvel run, actually wrote the S3 finale.