So I just recently started getting into the idw comics and was wondering if anyone could help me out and tell me what order to read them in and which are the best of the bunch
Some of the best you will want to check out is Last Stand of the Wreckers, Season 1 of More Than Meets The Eye and Robots in Disguise(not 2015) and Till,All Are One.
There's a post pinned at the top of the comics discussion forum about this. Personally I think it gets good during the "Chaos" arc of the first Transformers ongoing series, but most people recommend either "All Hail Megatron" which comes before or "Last Stand of the Wreckers" and "More Than Meets The Eye" which come immediately after.
I guess now that it's a thing, we should probably ask if you care at all about other Hasbro franchises like GI Joe, Mask, or Rom? Because if you get in deep enough, you're gonna have to deal with them in most of the recent TF books.
You get a nice long run of only Transformers before it. But then Hasbro and IDW decided that they really needed to use Transformers to prop up all their other dying 80s properties. So we now have a shared universe.
I thought ROM Space Knight was fun, because cyborg. Nothing else in the Revolution crossovers really mattered to me. You can pretty much skip all of it though, Revolutionaries (the recent ongoing series) will do a good job of catching you up once you get to it.
If you don't want to read the IDW continuity in its entirety and you just want to "catch up" to current events, then Robots In Disguise and More Than Meets The Eye are a nice place to start. Those are the two series a lot of people started with and they're easy to follow. Both titles do eventually get a name change and are rebranded as Optimus Prime and Lost Light respectively. Till All Are One is also good and relevant as well. And if you want some less important but still fun to read stories, then Last Stand Of The Wreckers and Sins Of The Wreckers are great too.
Start with 'the death of optimus prime' one-shot (No, the title's not a spoiler, believe it or not), then read More Than Meets The Eye and Robots in Disguise, the two books that follow off of it. Go from there- the first story arcs of each stand on their own, though they eventually meet at 'Dark Cybertron.'
If you do not want to read everything from before Phase 2 use this reading order with Death of Optimus Prime before reading mtmte 1 and RID 1; and The Transformers: Drift before mtmte 1; "Spotlight: Kup", " All Hail Megatron " 15a and "Spotlight: Drift" before LSotW; Also add and "Autocracy", "Primacy", "Monstrosity" and "The Transformers: Megatron Origin" sometime before mtmte 28. No you do not need to read them. You are not required to read the other titles to understand the comics of Transformers, maybe Revolutionaries that you would be forced to read and this is practically the comic of Transformers because of the 4 main characters 3 are characters of Transformers (and the writer is Jon Barber) and the other protagonist is Action Man who only appeared before that in a miniseries of 4 editions. The crossover you just had to read the main comic and the one-shots of Transformers and Action Man.
I've started fairly recently, and read it in chronological order up to The Death of Optimus Prime. While I enjoyed it, I'm more looking forward to the RID/MTMTE era, as I've heard good things. It's probably safe to just jump in there. Unless you're a continuity freak like me who needs to read everything.
I started with Last Stand of the Wreckers and then jumped into The Death of Optimus Prime and More than Meets the Eye. there's a few bits that I was shakey on, but for the most part reading the TFwiki helped.
