G1 comics. Yeah, they're total goofballs but they're lovable goofballs. And it was also a great showcase of interplanetary faux-pas that helped to remind us that these are alien robots. All too often Transformer writers (including IDW*) tend to portray the Transformers as being far too human, sometimes unbelievably so. One of Budiansky's strengths was how he liked to remind us that these are unearthly creatures.

-----------------
*IDWformers are sometimes not just too Earthly but often too Anglocentric! Although there was a recent moment when we heard someone describe how indecipherable spoken Cybertronian sounds like to humans, and another character explaining that many Cybertronian phonemes actually occur at ultrasonic frequencies. That's pretty damn cool (or as John Barber would say, "damm cool" )