How did you discover TF comics in the 80s?

[GoktimusPrime]

How did people in Australia in the 80s find out about Tf comics? did you just walk into a newsagent one day and just decide to buy it?

Yup.

were they released here before the cartoon?

Pretty much, yeah.

If so, then how did kids know what tfs were?

Transformers were already quite popular before the cartoon came out (although admittedly the cartoon did increase the popularity a lot). The toys came first, then the comics, then the cartoon. My fandom pretty much worked in that order... I got a few TF toys in 1984, then started reading my friends' comics (didn't start collecting for myself until late 1985/early 1986), then the cartoon aired on TV. By 1990 I had a standing order at my local comic store.

Apart from that crushing disappointment I was also a little miffed that for one issue of my short run they switched to another (and inferior) artist for the battle with Unicron.

That's a rather... um... bold and controversial statement. Geoff Senior is widely considered to be the best G1 artist alongside Andrew Wildman according to fan votes in the now defunct annual Trannies awards.

IMO Senior has a really good sense of 'animation' in his artwork - evoking vivid movement and bringing a sense of motion to what is really a series of still images. He also pencils and inks all of his own stuff. The artwork in the US comics was consistently let down by shoddy colouring by Nelson Yomtov, who was just terrible... but you can see Senior's (and Wildman's) art a lot better in the UK comics. Senior's art looks better in black and white than in Yomtov-colour IMO.