Quote Originally Posted by griffin View Post
The point of all that though, is that it highlights the lack of the central Hero character kids of Gen1 era wanted. We had 80 issues, and only 26 featured 'the great, iconic' Optimus Prime, with another 10 having brief cameo appearances, and 7 just showing his 'head on a bench'. That left 35 issues without Optimus Prime - almost half the entire comic run. More than half if you don't count the issues with just his head sitting on a bench.

It's no wonder the cartoon was more popular, because kids could see their hero Optimus in just about every episode, but in the Comic, he was hardly ever in it.
Um... Griffin... exactly which cartoon were you watching? In the cartoon I watched, Optimus was dead for twenty-eight episodes. Plus, the popularity argument makes no sense in that the cartoon only existed during the early most-'popular' years of Transformers - the comics lasted until 1991, which also makes them more enduring (and better) than the cartoon. Plus, of course the cartoon was more 'popular' - people got it for free! We chose to spend our pocket money on the comics while other kids were buying... I don't know, football cards.

Personally, as a loyal Grimlock-worshipping child, I loved the fact that Prime was dead almost as much as he was alive in the comics. We were eighties children in a dark era of comics: Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Spider-Man's black costume and Crisis on Infinite Earths. Transformers comics reflected that.