In 2012, IDW Publishing, which held the license to produce Transformers comics, launched a series that continued the original Marvel Comics continuity. IDW had already done a similar thing with G.I. Joe, hiring that title’s original Marvel writer, Larry Hama, to continue the series. Similarly, the revived original Transformers comic, subtitled Regeneration One (to distinguish it from other Transformers comics), would be written by the most celebrated writer of the original series, Simon Furman. Like IDW’s continuation of the original G.I. Joe comic, Regeneration One would continue the original series’s numbering. Joining Furman as the series’s original penciler was Andrew Wildman, who had penciled the final issues of the original series.

Regeneration One launched with an issue numbered #80.5, which was free as part of 2012′s Free Comic Book Day. Furman structured the series in five-issue arcs, although each of these arcs contained plot threads that continued directly from one arc into the next. During the third arc (titled “Destiny”), a supplemental issue was offered, numbered #0, which took place during the arc, just prior to its climax.

Originally, press reports stated that Furman would be continuing the continuity of the original U.S. series, ignoring both Generation 2 and the original U.K. issues (many of which Furman had himself written). In fact, the series did reference elements from the U.K. issues, although not in an obtrusive way that would confuse readers only familiar with the U.S. series. The new series did indeed ignore Generation 2, and references to the final issues of the original U.S. series abounded. In fact, although 20 years had passed since those issues (both in terms of publication and within Regeneration One), it sometimes seemed as if nothing had happened during this time; characters were still preoccupied by those events, 20 years later.