What's funny is that the Orion Pax/Megatron rivalry, at least in its modern form of Orion Pax the archivist and Megatron the gladiator-turned-freedom-fighter who start out working for the same cause but later become bitter rivals due to ideological and methodological differences, hasn't existed for all that long. Megatron and Orion Pax did interact in the G1 cartoon, but they weren't ever really friends or allies. Megatron just manipulated Orion until he could get what he wanted. Also, in this version of the story, Orion Pax was a dockworker. In the Marvel Comics, Optimus Prime was always Optimus Prime, and he and Megatron didn't seem to know each other very well before the war. (In the UK story State Games, they were opposing sports players and did team up briefly, but they definitely weren't long-time allies.) In the Unicron Trilogy, RID 2001, and Animated, there was no relationship between Optimus and Megatron prior to the war that was ever shown.

Dreamwave comics introduced the Orion-as-an-archivist plot, but he wasn't friends with Megatron in the Dreamwave backstory of the war, and he was actually called Optrionix rather than Orion Pax. The 2007 live-action movie established the idea of Optimus and Megatron being friends (maybe even brothers) before the war, but that seemed to mostly come from ancillary media rather than the movie itself. However, Optimus was never Orion Pax in the movies, nor was he an archivist. Megatron being a freedom fighter (of sorts) came from the All Hail Megatron miniseries from IDW1.

All of this was finally combined together for the modern backstory in the Aligned continuity, which established Orion Pax (not Optrionix) as an archivist, Megatron as a miner-turned-gladiator-turned revolutionary, and the one-time friendship between them that seems to have become their accepted backstory. IDW1 kind of adopted this idea eventually; it basically kept everything except Orion Pax's job before the war (he was a police officer rather than an archivist.) In short, then, the modern backstory has only existed for about eight to ten years.

 

I think it's kinda funny that this entire backstory stems from basically one throwaway line in the 2007 film; "You left me no choice, brother." Nothing in the movie preceding this line even implies this kind of dynamic between the two until Optimus says that.

I don't think the idea is bad per say, but I don't think I've ever seen it done well, mainly because even though we're told that they're good friends, we never actually get to see it. IDW2 isn't amazing when it comes to character work, but one thing I do appreciate is how one issue (I believe issue #6) actually shows the friendship between Orion and Megatron.

 

Yeah, I understand that Ruckley felt he needed Megatron and Optimus to be politicians so that the story could go where he wanted it to go without having to do any timeskips, but part of me wishes the story was set during the period that issue takes place. Orion and Megatron are more interesting characters there, with both of them being comparatively young and still figuring things out.

It was great seeing a young, perhaps slightly narcissistic, optimistic, daredevil, skydiving Megatron, and it told a lot about his character in the story in a very effective way in my opinion. But it didn’t last, y’know? You get that immediately eye-catching personality in that issue, whereas (and I do like Ruckley’s Megatron in a lot of ways) he is otherwise depicted much less vividly in the main story.

 

Just read the TPB. It reads better as a trade.