I quite liked their characterisations of Sunstorm and Bumper.

And the profile books were better than IDW's Beast Wars profile book.

The artwork for the first series of The War Within was decent.

Bumblebee being in charge for the Ongoing is much more enjoyable than the same in IDW.

 

Their MTMTE profile books were excellent.

Great pre-Earth War Within designs, aspects of which have been carried through other adaptations.

Armada and Energon comics were pretty good, much better than the cartoons they were associated with.

 

They created opportunities for artists from the fandom they may not otherwise have gotten, it's a shame things ended how they did.

 

The art looked great I know people complain about it for some reason but they still do it the same in books now you can only draw blocky robots so many ways.

 

War Within was good. The third part became pretty interesting as well until Dreamwave blew up.

 

The coloring was just AMAZING. Even when the line art was bad, I was almost always blown away by the colors.

 

Well I liked the colours.

 

The thing that Dreamwave did best (and Devil's Due did for GI Joe) is to alert Hasbro that there was still serious interest in the franchise, and a loyal, longtime audience hungry for any kind of new material.

And yeah, Dreamwave's coloring was great. What they did with digital painting and with color holds on linework beats a ton of what IDW does now, years later. Probably to the point of not being cost-effective for the time it took to do, which probably helped lead to Dreamwave's financial problems and artists not being paid.

 

They revived TF comics for the modern era and had consistently good art all around.

 

Dreamwave certainly had great colorists.
It helped greatly with Lee's artworks.  

War Within had nice moments.

Their Armada books were ok. The only thing I ever touched of this TF line.

But main DW's achievement was sustaining the franchise.

 

It won back the geewunner crowd to the franchise.

 

The profile books where great. It seems anything with more than meets the eye in the title seems to be all kinds of awesome and coincidently things with robots in disguise in the title tend end up a bit average hmm

The ongoing G1 thing, beast wars teaser and the energon comics was getting interesting and deserved endings

 

I was really enjoying the G1 story. I loved the Megs and Starscream characterizations, Sunstorm, and the Combaticons. I still wish IDW would finish those stories if they ever could- though it might easily be a copyright issue, I don't know. But if they did I'd be interested in buying them.

 

This^

Subjectively, anything Don Figueroa did (War Within, Vol. 3) I loved. He is my favorite TF artist by a mile.

Profile books were great as well.

 

I really liked the dialogue once their G1 ongoing started. Each character had a distinctive way of speaking, that in many ways called back to their cartoon voices.

 

I felt they were also starting to do what we love about MTME right now, flesh out more obscure characters in interesting ways. The turbomaster squad that they were exploring when they went belly up were really intriguing to me. I liked how the were still trying to find ways to have fun and be happy in spite of all the bad stuff happening around them.

Also as said, colors and profile books for the win!

 

I liked a lot of the stories they worked on, War within especially. The art was okay, but it looked a bit wonky at some points. The colors were good too, Dreamwave's run had some cool concepts and ideas.

 

Coloring, especially in the G1 ongoing. IDW still hasn't caught up to that. It's a lot better with MTMTE and RID than it was in prior series, but just look at the deep colors and shading of those Dreamwave books... very hard to beat.
G1 Vol 1 was a stinker in every way. Vol 2 was a lot better (with some interesting ideas) in story... the art still kinda stunk though.

Don's G1 v3 series still has the best looking transformers on the printed page and a very interesting story. IDW stories nowdays have surpassed that, but it was on a very interesting path (the whole cloning thing in v3). Art wise, RID (MTMTE isn't great looking) is pretty close, but v3 is still my favorite.

The Summer Special was really good too.

I also like how they incorporated features in the G1 toys that were of "innaccurate toy" heritage into the comic designs, for example Brawn and Bumbebee's faceplates, Ironhide's gun, Jetfire's armored design vs unarmored, etc.

War Within 1 and 2 were both pretty great, especially 1.

Putting aside Vol 1 everything and Vol 2's art, DW's transformers was a lot more good than bad. It took about 8 years to get back where DW was. Storywise, it took everything IDW had through AHM to get it to the right spot. Artwise, it's still lagged behind on lines until RID (which is pretty close), and is still behind (though better) on coloring. If only IDW would hire the old DW colorists because the IDW colorists on top of Don's lines put out what was easily the best looking coming on the stands at the time. Today, at least IDW is finally moving past flat coloring and pastels (RID again, less so MTMTE), but it could do itself a huge favor by just looking at Volume 3 and emulating the colors.













Seriously, that last panel... gorgeous from top to bottom.

 

Weren't you like four when Dreamwave was publishing, ugh. You keep increasing that post count, yo.

Anyways,

The renewed interest in the franchise alone was worth Dreamwave. My only comparison to the excitement the comic revival sparked back then is the current excitement over Masterpiece figures now.

People were gaga over the books back then. It's only with the current direction with IDW that people have been retro-actively hating on DW with such passion. Gotta tear everything else down to make what you currently love seem like the best evah.

For me,

War and Peace along the ongoing; love it to death and always will. It'd just make my day if IDW hired the Mick duo to continue with that story, but it would probably turn out like Furman's RG1.

Don's work on both series was amazing.

The profile books were so awesome.

WW1 and 2, of course.

And yeah, the Armada and Energon book were so much better than the cartoons.

Creatively, DW got more right than it wrong.