Oh my, yes we did indeed
I discovered them at issue 84 (right in the middle of Target: 2006). I have good reason to believe that they only hit the Australian shelves somewhere around then.
Why? Because up until that point we (my sister and I) had been spending our pocket money (oh my god the two or three dollars we got each week seems utterly pitiful looking back now
) on Disney comics (and even at that young age - I would have been 9 when I discovered TF comics - I had already done what so many Disney readers over the decades had done - identified Carl Barks' work standing head and shoulders over everybody else's, even with no names ever being attached). Anyway, I was keenly aware of what comics were out there, even if I didn't care for most of them. And then one week I spotted Transformers, which simply had not been there before.
UK issue 84 is dated 25th of October 1986; that's the date on which it was supposed to be removed from the shelf if unsold (I know that my local newsagent didn't work like that, because I managed to hide that issue, plus a few others, behind other comics until I decided with issue 88 to start buying them - even at that age I was suspicious of Marvel-style never-ending run-on stories that you could never just pick up and read without piles of background). Add around 2-ish months for transport by boat from the UK (yes, that long, and it's true even today of something like 2000AD), and this discovery happened somewhere around late December 1986 / early January 1987.
Of course, I could be wrong, and they might just, for some reason, have never been distributed way out there any earlier.
Still have them all, too.
Originally Posted by DELTAprime
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