Cyclonus

Cyclonus is the answer to a problem the Decepticons had never solved: a second-in-command who is both competent and genuinely loyal. Reformatted by Unicron from the wreckage of the Decepticons jettisoned from Astrotrain after the assault on Autobot City, he emerged as a warrior whose devotion to Galvatron is so total that it crowds out almost every other emotion or interest. He has the brains to plan, the power to enforce, and the initiative to act without orders. He could take the throne any time he wanted, as the power behind it or by simply removing his lunatic master. His answer to that suggestion is always the same: all hail Galvatron.

What makes him compelling is that the loyalty costs him constantly. Galvatron beats him. In "Five Faces of Darkness" Cyclonus enters Unicron's severed head and replays its memory banks to trace his missing leader to Thrull, hauls him out of the plasma pool, and is brutalised for his trouble by a Galvatron the lava has driven insane. In "Webworld", cornered by mutinous Decepticons and out of options, he takes a Quintesson's advice and tricks Galvatron into the mental institution on Torkulon, then watches every therapy fail and finally intervenes rather than let them lobotomise him. In "Dweller in the Depths" Galvatron throws him to an energy vampire to buy himself time.

He is also one of the few Decepticons with a code. Trapped in a negative universe with Ultra Magnus, Wreck-Gar and Marissa Faireborn in "The Killing Jar", he cooperates to escape and parts on terms of grudging mutual respect, with the understanding that the next meeting will be as enemies.

Reformatted by Unicron, so like Galvatron he can draw power from the chaos-bringer in proportion to need. He transforms into a Cybertronian fighter craft driven by nuclear-powered turbine engines capable of well over Mach 2, and in robot mode carries an oxidating laser that fuses an enemy's internal mechanisms. He is a capable strategist and field commander, holding the Decepticons together on Chaar with no leader and no energon. His tech spec lists no weaknesses at all, which is itself the point: the card notes he has no weaknesses and no interests other than conquest. The fiction supplies the real one, which is that his loyalty is exploitable and Galvatron exploits it relentlessly. In 1987's "The Rebirth" he binary-bonds with the Nebulan Nightstick and becomes a Targetmaster.

• Galvatron: absolute, unrewarded loyalty; he searches the galaxy for a leader who then beats him, feeds him to a monster in "Dweller in the Depths", and never once earns his defection.
• Scourge: his usual field partner and de facto subordinate despite Scourge commanding the Sweeps, the two of them running joint operations such as the takeover of Paradron in "Fight or Flee".
• Ultra Magnus: opposite numbers and Galvatron's alternating punching bags, who fight repeatedly but part with declared respect after "The Killing Jar".
• Starscream's ghost: possessed by the dead Decepticon in "Starscream's Ghost" and "Ghost in the Machine", the one force that can genuinely take him away from Galvatron.

Marvel inverts the pairing completely. In the comics Scourge is the scheming brain and Cyclonus is the dull-witted muscle, the reverse of the cartoon. Simon Furman also had Cyclonus claim he was rebuilt from a Decepticon called "Life Spark", a misreading of a movie summary Furman had read before ever seeing the film. Comics Cyclonus is not permanently loyal either: once Galvatron is stranded in the past, he and Scourge sell him out to the bounty hunter Death's Head, kill Shockwave under Unicron's mind control, and later confront Galvatron directly to demand his time-travel device. He also has no principled streak; the honourable warrior who respects Ultra Magnus is purely a cartoon invention.

In the cartoon he survives to the end, still at Galvatron's side as a Targetmaster, sent spiralling through space aboard Scorponok at the close of "The Rebirth, Part 3"; the Japanese Headmasters series degrades him into a cackling henchman who once drops a rock on Galvatron by accident. Marvel kills him properly: in "Dry Run!" a brainwashed Megatron clone crushes Nightstick and tears Cyclonus's head from his body, twenty years before he was created. Scourge abandons him rather than intervene. The paradox of his death accelerates the space-time rift that drives "Time Wars", and a deranged Shockwave strings his remains up as a trophy before returning them through the rift.

• The line "Cyclonus, and his armada" is a leftover from an earlier script draft in which Cyclonus was meant to have duplicates the way Scourge has the Sweeps; the movie animates two identical Cyclonuses being created, then the second vanishes and is replaced by a third Sweep for the rest of the film.
• Roger C. Carmel struggled to keep the voice consistent, with the pitch and tone drifting noticeably between episodes; after his death Jack Angel took the role for the final five episodes of the series.
• The 1986 toy is based on an earlier version of the animation design with folded-back wings; that earlier design is what Marvel's artists drew, and it also slips into the cartoon by mistake in a few shots.
• Designer Floro Dery's entire comment on the character was "Cyclonus was a small time demon".
• In the US printing of Headmasters #2, artist Frank Springer drew a giant version of Nightstick where Cyclonus should have been, coloured to match him; the UK printing renamed the giant figure "Krunix" because British readers already knew Cyclonus well from exclusive strips.
• Mass-shifting problem: in the movie his vehicle mode is a full-sized starship carrying Galvatron inside, but he is a normal-sized robot who never displays that scale again in season three.

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 Unicron reformatted into Cyclonus is the longest-running dispute in G1 fandom, with two candidates: Bombshell and Skywarp. The movie animates Bombshell transforming into a Cyclonus body in the foreground while Skywarp becomes a second, identical Cyclonus in the background, and the storyboards show only Bombshell. That framing, plus the convention of putting the named character in front, is the core Bombshell case.
• The Skywarp case rests on symmetry and colour: Thundercracker, the blue Seeker from Megatron's inner circle since the Nemesis, becomes Galvatron's blue lieutenant Scourge, so the purple Seeker should become the purple lieutenant. Bombshell is purple-accented but was never a jet and was never in Megatron's inner circle. The 1986 cross-sell catalogues also swapped Thundercracker and Skywarp out for Cyclonus and Scourge in the Decepticon Planes section.
• Evidence cuts both ways after the fact. Insecticons including Bombshell clearly appear after the movie, in the film itself and in season three episodes such as "Five Faces of Darkness" Parts 1, 3 and 5, and Marvel UK's "Space Pirates!" shows Bombshell alive post-movie, which rules him out in that continuity. IDW's 20th anniversary animated-movie adaptation captions Bombshell as Cyclonus and Skywarp as his armada; the 20th Anniversary DVD lenticular cover and the Australian-written Madman DVD bios say Skywarp; 2007's Masterpiece Skywarp came with an 'Armada Decepticon' sticker, pushing the other way again.
• Cyclonus's own Transformers Universe bio sidesteps the question entirely by saying he was made from the "parts of dead Decepticons", plural, supporting a third camp that holds Unicron mixed and matched raw material and no single donor exists. The movie script says only that the "other Decepticons" were turned into Scourge, Cyclonus and their minions.
• A fourth position is that it does not matter, since Cyclonus never once shows any trace of a former life, unlike Galvatron who occasionally hints at having been Megatron.