Before MTMTE (IDW)

[Sharky]

G1 ran for 302 issues. (just sayin' )

yeah but they were always only ever part of a standard comic story... so the count is fudged a little in my opinion

[Paulbot]

There's a series of 8 collections (handily called Transformers: IDW Collection for about $40 each online) that includes everything you could have read up to the MTMTE and mostly in order.

But it doesn't mean you should have or must have. Generally MTMTE works as a standalone comic (with the 125th special - hence why it's included in the MTMTE collections).

The two issues I think are must reads are James Roberts issues of the IDW ongoing series (#22 and #23). They most involve flashbacks set in the prewar era and introduce many of the elements (like functionalism) that he explored in further in the Shadowplay 3-parter.

The most recent MTMTE story ties into Last Stand of the Wreckers, and that's also a good, and generally standalone, series worth reading.

RID on the otherhand is a bit more tied to things like Spotlight:Arcee, and Chaos, and All Hail Megatron.

yeah but they were always only ever part of a standard comic story... so the count is fudged a little in my opinion

Yeah there were over 300 UK issues, but they had on average 11 new pages per issue (at most 17 pages and that was rarely) compared to the average 22 pages of an IDW comic. But then 80s comics weren't decompressed so perhaps more happened per issue. It's probably somewhere about a tie, but IDW is still ongoing.