Bombshell

Bombshell is the Insecticon who does not need to beat you, because he can simply take your mind and use it. His cerebro-shells are the trio's most genuinely frightening weapon, and he deploys them with the enthusiasm and recklessness of a child with a new toy. There is nothing childlike about the results. He takes visible, gleeful pleasure in forcing victims into humiliating and self-destructive acts, to the point that other Decepticons keep their distance, uneasily aware that he would enjoy playing the same game with them.

His standing is the trio's standing. He, Shrapnel and Kickback ejected from the Decepticon cruiser as it went down, took insectoid forms from damaged idento-computers, and lived four million years as their own species. They are mercenaries, not soldiers. In "A Plague of Insecticons" Bombshell debuts the insecti-shell and the clone beam, blowing a farming machine apart and converting the fragments into a swarm, then leads the trio in gorging on Megatron's energon cache and abandoning the Decepticons mid-battle. Leadership alternates between him and Shrapnel; Kickback is not consulted.

His best showing is "The Insecticon Syndrome", where he bugs Soundwave, then systematically bugs the entire Decepticon army until only Megatron is left, and orders his new slaves to open fire on their own leader. It nearly works. What defeats him is appetite, not tactics: the Nova power he ate is unstable, and the antidote strips his stolen bulk and his control at once.

He is memorable for that combination, a mind-control specialist with real engineering skill, who upgrades Nightbird into a functional assassin in "Enter the Nightbird" and rebuilds the exploded Shrapnel in seconds, all wrapped around a hunger he cannot govern.

Bombshell fires cerebro-shells from his head-mounted cannon: implants that burrow into a victim's skull and place them under his direct control, effective on humans, Autobots and Decepticons alike, and on gestalts such as Superion in the comics. He also fires destructive insecti-shells, wields clone beams that convert scrap metal into Insecticon duplicates, transforms into a rhinoceros beetle, and is a capable engineer, rebuilding the shattered Shrapnel with a magnetic shell and rearming the human-built Nightbird as an assassin. Weaknesses: cerebro-shells are not absolute, a strong-willed victim can throw one off, as Hoover Dam engineer Ricky Vasquez does in "Aerialbots over America!", and a competent medic can extract one, as Ratchet does for Mirage in "Traitor". He also shares the Insecticons' crippling energy hunger, which is how Megatron rents them, and the extra mass he gains from the Nova power core proves unstable and reversible.

• Shrapnel: co-leader and rival, whom Bombshell nonetheless reassembles from fragments in seconds after the Nova power detonates him.
• Kickback: the third Insecticon, excluded from the leadership rotation and, in Dreamwave's telling, happy to needle Bombshell and Shrapnel against each other.
• Megatron: employer, mark and victim. Bombshell bugs his entire army in "The Insecticon Syndrome" and is repeatedly swindled by him in return.
• Soundwave: his most valuable conquest, since taking Soundwave gave him access to the rest of the Decepticon ranks.

Marvel makes Bombshell the trio's genuine strategist and the only one whose actions reshape the plot. Starting as a soldier at Darkmount under Lord Straxus, he is bridged to Earth and reformatted as an Insecticon with mass-shifting powers. At Hoover Dam he takes over engineer Ricky Vasquez to get the Decepticons inside, and when the raid fails he clings to Silverbolt and rides into the Ark, where he plants a shell in Optimus Prime during a medical exam. It cannot control Prime, but it lets Megatron siphon the Creation Matrix and give life to the Stunticons in "Heavy Traffic!". He later negotiates with Cobra over Power Station Alpha, is shot down by the Baroness and dissected by Doctor Mindbender. The UK Earthforce strips have him drive Superion berserk and rewrite the memories of reporter Irwin Spoon for a smear campaign, both far more consequential than anything the cartoon lets him accomplish.

Bombshell is mortally wounded at the Battle of Autobot City in The Transformers: The Movie and is among the damaged Decepticons jettisoned from Astrotrain into space to lighten the load, alongside Megatron, Shrapnel, Kickback, Skywarp and Thundercracker. Unicron uses the floating bodies as raw material for his new servants. Bombshell is most often identified as the basis for Cyclonus, or for the Cyclonus armada that accompanies him, though the film deliberately never shows which body becomes which Decepticon and the alternative reading makes him a Sweep like his teammates. Insecticons still turn up in 2006 crowd scenes, explained as surviving clones or animator convenience.

• Like the other two, the toy is a recoloured Diaclone Waruder Kabutron, an alien-piloted mech, which explains the opening chest compartment; the mould was reused for the Salvo drones.
• Action Master Bombshell (1991) was released only in European markets, moved his signature head cannon onto a matching hand-held blaster, and came with a robot scarab partner, Needler, that doubles as a backpack and battle helmet.
• Voiced by Michael Bell in English, who also voiced Prowl and Sideswipe among others.
• In the cartoon Bombshell alternates leadership of the trio with Shrapnel, an arrangement neither the toy bios nor the comics support.
• Dreamwave heavily implied that Bombshell's cerebro-shells were the technological basis for the "Shell Program" used in Beast Wars to reprogram Maximal protoforms into Predacons.

Where the cartoon, the Marvel comics and the toy bios disagree, or where a popular claim does not hold up. We record these rather than smoothing them over.

• Who he became. The reformatting scene assigns nothing explicitly, so Bombshell is variously identified as Cyclonus, as part of the Cyclonus armada, or as a Sweep.
• Leadership: the cartoon alternates command of the trio between Bombshell and Shrapnel, while other Generation One material names Venom as the Insecticon leader.
• Cerebro-shell reliability: the cartoon's shells are near-absolute mind control, while Marvel's fail on Optimus Prime and are thrown off by an ordinary human's willpower, and the UK strips describe them as having become more reliable only later.
• Origin: the cartoon has him insectoid for four million years before meeting Megatron; Marvel and Dreamwave have him serving on Cybertron in a non-insect body and being converted afterwards.