Transformers: Foundation

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"Robin, human growth hormone has taken years off my aaah!"
"I'll get back to you Nick."

Transformers: Foundation is a 4-issue comic-book mini-series published by IDW Publishing from February to May in 2011, having been pushed back from its original intended start date of December 2010.^[1] Together with the concurrently-published Transformers: Rising Storm (and to an extent Sector 7), it serves as a prequel to Dark of the Moon, charting more of the live-action movie universe's history.

«	Transformers: Foundation issues:	»
#1 #2 #3 #4

1 Overview
2 Creative team
3 Collections
4 References

Overview

The origin of the bitter rivalry between Optimus Prime and Megatron starts here! But what is the secret connection that will forever bind them? And how will it affect the future of all Transformers?

Foundation examines the origins of the feud between Optimus Prime and Megatron, winding the clock back to the earliest point yet revealed in the characters' lives as students under Sentinel Prime thousands of years ago. Optimus and Megatron narrate alternate issues of the series, beginning with their rise to power as the joint leaders of Cybertron, as Megatron turns to evil over jealousy that Optimus is Sentinel's favored pupil, while Optimus struggles with the unearned power that comes with Sentinel's belief that he is a descendant of the Dynasty of Primes. The second half of the series then moves events forward to the height of the civil war, leading up to the Autobots' capture of the AllSpark, setting the stage for the original Movie Prequel, including the seeming death of Sentinel Prime as part of the backstory for Dark of the Moon.

The series is closely tied in to IDW's earlier Revenge of the Fallen prequel, Defiance, complimenting and building upon it and working in and around the gaps in its story to flesh out the characters' motivations and successfully managing to add backstory elements necessary for Dark of the Moon into a story not originally intended to accommodate them. It is also tied into the simultaneously published Rising Storm, with both books crafting an interconnected sub-plot that centres on the troubled relationship between Optimus and Elita-One, with Foundation also showing how his friendship with Ironhide strengthened as his changing ideologies pushed Elita away. At the heart of this was a study of the ferocious "berserker" personality that Optimus displayed in Revenge of the Fallen that has so often come under criticism from fans, which redefined him as a 'bot forcibly stripped of naivety and thrust onto the razor's edge between reason and rage. In addition to Sentinel, new Dark of the Moon characters Shockwave, Wheeljack and the Driller make their shared debuts across this series and Rising Storm.

Creative team

Foundation was written by John Barber, who also scribed the other Dark of the Moon prequels for maximum interconnected storytelling. Fittingly, artwork for the series is by Andrew Griffith, who also drew portions of Defiance, with colors by Priscilla Tramontano. Standard covers were produced for the series by Brian Rood, while Griffith produced a series of retailer incentive exclusive variants that combined to form a panorama of the central characters of the series.