Dorling Kindersley Transformers- The Ultimate Guide by Simon Furman

Most people will remember the Transformers from the Toy line and Saturday Morning Cartoon that eventually became the big budget movie from Michael Bay. But there was more than one series of the Transformers, and the big-budget, live-action movie wasn't the first attempt to revive the franchise, and the series has seen the change of characters from both the Autobot and Decepticon side. Megatron, for example, went from a gun to a tank and several other changes,including becoming an actual planet at one point, while Optimus Prime remained essentially the same, going from being a semi-truck to a more complicated semi-truck, and has died and been rebuilt or revived more than once.

The greatest changes were to Hot Rod, who went from a simple autobot to the leader known as Rodimus Prime after Optimus Prime died the first time and was given the spark of Leadership by Optimus.

And then of course there were the Beast Wars Transformers, who may or may not have had something to do with the regular transformers line, and whose "Optimus Primal" merely adopted that name in a homage to the original Optimus Prime (understanding the timelines is involved here otherwise, it is massively confusing, and even then, I am still not sure I get it).

Each iteration and season is covered in exhaustive detail, such as when the Beast Wars Maximals and Predacons became the Transmetals and/or Fuzors. Also covered are the American and English versions of the comic, and the Dreamwave Comic series.

If you liked the Transformers movie by Michael Bay and want to learn more about the 1980's cartoon series and toys that led to this becoming a comic, you can do no better than this book. Or if you just wanted to relive the toys you played with as a young sprog, the same goes here. This book, of large page size, but small page numbers, will go far to bringing back memories of that series and time, and let you remember the storylines in both comics and Tv series and movies as well.

The DK (Dorling Kindersley) series of books are always chock-full of information, and this is no exception. For a book that gives both an exhaustive overview and many, many details, this book shines as an example of how to do it. And for making you remember your youth, you can't beat it.