#25: Spinister (1988)

I'm pretty sure I owned Spinister. He's one of the ones I have to put my hands up and say that I'm not too sure about. I've played with the toy since, so I know how cool it is, but I can't honestly remember if I had him as a kid or not.

I do know one thing. That Spinister is cool. I adore the fact that he's a bit of a mystery, that no one seems to know anything about him, Autobot OR Decepticon. I loves the mysterious characters, and Spinister is certainly one of those.

In the Marvel G1 comics, Spinister was part of Thunderwing's Mayhe Attack Squad (the Decepticon version of the Wreckers). But Spinister was never subservient to Thunderwing. He was more of a thinker than the others, more willing to go against Thunderwing if he acted too crazy. To Spinister's mind, Thunderwing leaving Needlenose to the tender mercies of the Matrix infused horror on planet VsQs was too far.

The fact that Spinister rebelled always made me like him. I like the fact that Furman writes Decepticons who ARE for their cause, and who will stick together and not split apart when things go wrong. They're an army, after all, and armies don't usually cut and run or leave comrades. Not most of the time, anyways.

Spinister's toy wasn't amazing, but neither was it bad, some of the detail (especially on his face) and the double Targetmaster gimmick are cool,and his loud, bright colours just about typify the later era of Transformers to me. His Tech Spec was great too, a marvellous example of the writers really having hit their stride with the Transformers bios.

It does look like the James Roberts has struck again with Spinister - MTMTE #7 features himself, so I would imagine he is now nigh impossible to find on the eBay. On the other hand though, if he's more popular we might get a modern version of him that isn't just for Botcon attendees. Hmm...