Poor Snarl is just not a happy bunny. Or Stegosaur, for that matter. The whole picture painted of him in his Tech Specs is that of someone whose lot in life has never been great, even before he crash-landed on Earth. A loner by nature, who would just as soon you left him alone, rather than be involved in one of the major wars of the galaxy.
Not that you'd really know it from any of the fiction he's been in, of course. Never one of the more popular Dinobots, like Slag he often is found on the sidelines. Heck, he's not even in Transformers: The Movie, to any great extent. Four shots. FOUR. Even that appears to be an afterthought, as well. Poor Snarl. I mean, it started off terribly well. He was first introduced with Swoop in "War of the Dinobots" as a force to fight the rogue Dinobots who seemed to have joined with Megatron, and he was relatively successful, keeping the rogues busy while the rest of the Autobots fought the rest of the Decepticons. After that, his next big moment came in the two parter "Dinobot Island", where, at the behest of Grimlock, he did "tail stuff". Sadly, it was all downhill from there, and he became very much a background dino, usurped by the seemingly more glamourous Swoop, and the ever present (and popular) Grimlock.
Of course, in the comics, Snarl did even less, the limited cast of said comic books only again allowing a couple of Dinobots to shine brightly, and again, those Dinos where Swoop, and most definitely Grimlock (an apparent favourite of Bob Budiansky, and pretty much Simon Furman's favourite character EVER.) Snarl did have the dubious honour of acquiring a very rare Transformer disease, this particular nasty being Corrodia Gravis, a wasting disease that caused poor Snarl to basically rust to death. Luckily for Snarl though, the rest of the Dinobots found a temporary cure, in that they moved his mind into an ACTUAL Stegosaurus while they made him a new body, which, with Snarl's hatred of that form already, must have been just like heaven for him.
In the IDWverse, it's business as usual. Snarl doesn't do much. Maybe someday he'll have his moment, but with everything being a bit Grimlock-centric right now (when isn't it?), then he may have to wait a little bit longer though. Still, I like Snarl. It's nice when Tech Specs try to inject a bit more character into proceedings, and giving Snarl the pretty fatal flaw of hating his alt-mode, well, that could make for a very interesting character indeed. It's a shame that Furman loved Tyrannosaurs with speech impediments, rather than grumpy Stegosaurs who are powered by the sun.
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