It's a staggeringly good time to be a Transformers fan.

The reasons why are myriad: prices on lots of premium toys dropping like campaign promises all over eBay, me snagging a G2 Megatron in box for a price that bordered on stupid, Decepticon logos on cars (other than mine), Robots in Disguise bringing the concept of car-robots back to TV and toy stores and the new Armada series not looking completely awful in the ToyFair preview shots. The biggest reason, however, is a quarter inch from hitting comic stands everywhere, and that's the Pat Lee-driven Dreamwave revival of Transformers: G1.

If you've been sleeping under a rock and missed the announcements on Comicon and other sites, here's the dilly, yo: Through some unknown combination of black magic, painful beatings with lead pipes and oiled-up lapdancers, Dreamwave Productions (the kids who do Dark Minds and Warlands and who also recently left Image) snuck out of Hasbro with the second licensing agreement that poaches on those maligned halcyon days of the 1980s. Pat Lee has been churning out preview art (covers, posters and so forth) and letting them leak to the world at large, and the results are staggering. I've seen some of the stuff he was doing before, and it was cute, but not particularly distinctive. This is the real thing. Transformers is the property Lee was born to draw, with detailed depictions (several of which my dear friend Allen will intersperse in the text of this week's drool-fest) that make even the beloved images from the cartoon series (long on looks, short on continuity) look like they were done by a drunken, one-armed midget. Steve, my comic-pusher-cum-archenemy at Comics Ink, let me thumb through a preview issue. The writing, the pacing, the art...it looks good. Nothing like a giant shot of Soundwave being dug out of a glacier to get the heart pumping.

You see, not all Transfans are down with Sunstreaker and Ravage. G1 (defined as everything up to and including movie continuity, which was also mirrored in a season or two of TV shows) is just one part of the marketing-spawned universe of Transformers fandom. G2 was a slightly remixed version of G1, near as I can tell, including a G.I. Joe crossover that made a tank of Megatron and replaced his nigh-all-powerful fusion cannon with a railgun (impressive, but a railgun can't hook up to a black hole and use it like a Energizer), along with other changes, like giving the red Lamborghini Sideswipe a black paint job. Then things get really nutsoid.

To be honest, I stopped paying attention after the whole railgun thing. Beast Machines and Beast Wars came along, which I passed by with a sigh in my local KayBee, because ugly robots who transform into badly misshapen animals is just not cool. My homeboy Allen informed me (he's really knowledgeable about this stuff, to a borderline scary point) that the post-G2 versions had not been designed by those kooky kids at Takara in Japan, but stateside by U.S. designers who seemed to have some serious problems infusing any coolness into, well, anything. This point will come back to haunt you in a few paragraphs, so feel free to take note of it now.

Near as I can figger, the "bad guys" began very seriously stomping the "good guys" senseless, and ensuing series cast the Autobots (who became "Maximals" at one point, dear god) as underdogs. Continuity wonks, worry not. Seems this was the same Cybertron which Orson Welles nearly ate but itself rebooted after some creative time-travelling. Whatever. I thought it was all crap, and a small and devoted legion of fans notwithstanding, it made Glitter level money and soon went the way of the Monchichi.

Dreamwave (again these zany guys...I love 'em!) managed to secure a license to develop comic property for everything Transformers related. So they are free to do, and allegedly have planned, G2, Beast Wars, Beast Machines, Robots in Disguise and Armada comic projects. As dumb as I believe Optimus Primal looked, I think Pat Lee can make him look cool, and that's bad news for my wallet.

Now we come to my favorite part of the scheme: continuity. Any regular reader of my column will know I'm a fan of it, particularly knowing all the problems it can cause in the hands of the indifferent or incompetent. Y'see, Simon Furman came into the TF comic, took the disparate threads of "maybe it makes sense" and "what the hell?" as well as crappy new toy releases fobbed off on him by boobs at Hasbro (Larry Hama sings a similar song about his time on G.I. Joe) and wove them all into a meta-narrative of grand scale, without any of the Grant Morrison metaphysics that can sometimes confuse people or the Mr. Majestic silver age goofiness that keeps it from being taken seriously. It was very different from the cartoon (really, if Megaton had a frickin' cannon on his arm, why would he suddenly learn how to make an energy morningstar on the end of his arm and then never remember to use it again? Dumbass.), and even different from the critically acclaimed Marvel UK continuity. (You should see some of the stuff they did. Those kids are weird.) Furman's works have finally been collected by a cool company called Titan Books and made available in TPB formats. (I now have all of the bound collections, and man do they read well as a body of work.)

Remember Dreamwave? They jumped right on where Furman left off. Rumor has it he's even gonna come back and write some stuff, with Lee on art. Hannibal says, "This is a good thing, children."

Dreamwave's TF: G1 book, a six-issue mini (IIRC) slated to hit the stands in April, feels right. You know how some days you wake up, throw on some clothes and then glance at yourself in the mirror and notice all the colors complement each other and the way the clothes hang on your body shows off your good points and minimizes your bad ones, as though you'd spent weeks planning that outfit? TF: G1 feels right in the same way. I can't speak for Beast Machines or what have you, but G1 (which debuted at #1 on retailer pre-orders and is kicking major booty before it ever reaches you) looks to be the real thing, the holy grail, the golden fleece and the head cheerleader from high school naked in your bedroom all wrapped up into one.

(Maybe the cheerleader was too much, but you get the point. Sorry, any ladies who're reading...I just didn't expect you to be here. Right.)

Dreamwave isn't limiting its wicked plans for world domination to the direct market. Hasbro is gonna be packaging its insanely well-crafted vignettes as mini-comics in the new toys the company is releasing this fall: a new line called Transformers: Armada. Now, remember that thing about American designers and cool toys? TF: Armada features both some of Hasbro's finest accomplishments and some of their biggest failures.

On the good side, the stylized Optimus Prime looks great and, coolest of all, when you transform the tractor truck, it sends an infrared signal to the trailer, which transforms all by itself. Change the robot back to truck, the trailer follows suit without you laying a hand on it. That's so freaking cool, I got over my no-Autobot-buying stigma (I'm a bad guy, I should buy bad robots, but bigger ones are hard to find at decent prices, I tell ya), and I am gonna grab one of these when they hit stores.

On the bad side, few of the other robots transform into vehicles that look like anything you'd recognize. Takara's amazing success in capturing the zeitgeist of the Transformers was making the final toys look like real things. Hound looks like a real Army jeep. Bluestreak looks just like the 280Z I drove past today. Starscream looks like every F-15 I ever saw in a war movie. Hasbro decided instead to make "futurized" versions, including a Megatron tank that looks like a starfish, a bulky helicopter that looks like an escapee from A Bug's Life and a repaint of one of Beast Machine's biggest failures, Jetstorm, the robot that can't stand up. How hard is it to make robots that transform into Apache helicopters (plenty of footage left from Desert Storm, let alone today), F-22 Raptors (a very cool looking plane—imagine a six-inch robot made from one), PT Cruisers or that sleek new Cadillac? Morons.

Dreamwave promises a more mature look at this millennia-old conflict (no need to get Azzarello with it, but dying should be less of a possibility and more of a fact of life). Chances are, the good guys are gonna have to cut some corners to stay alive, Omega Supreme or not. This is a good thing. To win, you sometimes have to do what it takes (even though I secretly want to see what the Decepticons would do with universal domination...probably screw it up, since most empires that come to power through violence are horrible at hanging on to the reins...long digression again, sorry).

So, all around, if you like Transformers, you have a reason to be happy, even if some of the toys out now are not as good as the ones you had as a youth. If people still try to call you a big kid, screw 'em. The guy with the best toys has the most fun, and the best is now within your grasp.

Oh, before I forget (and so I can move past that lame ending), Black Panther is going bi-weekly later this year, and the Peter David-inspired hubbub over Captain Marvel has the price of both books remaining at current levels (screw Spider-Girl, I hate that book). If you're not already reading Black Panther, you should. If you read it and don't like it, then you're probably not a fan of my column and are only reading this sentence because you have nothing else to do right now. It is, bar none, the finest monthly comic on the stands and deserves your money. The two trades will help you catch up quickly. Go buy. Oh, and Captain Marvel's pretty good as well, but Black Panther is literature-quality good. Go. Now. Really.