Quote Originally Posted by GoktimusPrime View Post
Considering that it typically takes a year to conceive a Transformer toy, I suspect that the IDW artists would have had access to images (or even early samples) of the toy and based their design off that. The same thing happened with Classics Jetfire -- we saw him appearing in the IDW comics before the toy was released, but in reality the comic model was still based on the toy design.
So media off of toys. I see your general point on this fully now.