Kickback

Kickback is the charmer of the Insecticons and by some distance the most unpleasant of the three, because his weapon is other people. He collects friends the way other Transformers collect energon cubes, and the collecting is the point: every confidence he gathers is filed away as leverage. Scratch the affable surface and there is a manipulative blackmailer who prefers his teammates working for him under duress rather than by choice. Humans, in particular, fall for the honeyed words.

He shares the trio's origin and their standing. Kickback, Shrapnel and Bombshell ejected in their own pod before the Ark went down, were rewritten by damaged idento-computers into grasshopper, stag beetle and rhinoceros beetle forms and spent four million years in Demon Swamp becoming something Megatron cannot simply order about. Their alliance with the Decepticons in "A Plague of Insecticons" is a contract, not an enlistment, and it survives only as long as Megatron keeps paying in food. Within the trio Kickback is the odd one out: leadership alternates between Shrapnel and Bombshell and nobody asks him. Dreamwave's Extermination reads that correctly and has him quietly stirring the two of them against each other for entertainment.

The fiction gives him small, characteristic beats rather than big ones. In "The Insecticon Syndrome" he helps overrun Hound, Beachcomber and Bumblebee in a redwood forest by kicking a felled trunk at them while the others push with their arms, then joins Bombshell in rebuilding the shattered Shrapnel before the trio bolts. It is a tidy summary of him: opportunistic, physical, and gone before the bill arrives.

Kickback transforms into a grasshopper with super-charged legs that let him leap enormous distances and kick through solid steel; a single kick can flatten a reinforced door or launch a felled redwood at an enemy. He carries an electrothermic blast tube in robot mode, shares the Insecticons' clone-beam ability to convert scrap metal into swarms of duplicates, and can digest organic and artificial matter alike for fuel. Weaknesses: in insect mode he is badly destabilised trying to fly through high winds, and he shares the Insecticons' defining vulnerability, an enormous and constant appetite for energy that grows worse the more clones they field, which is exactly what Megatron exploits to buy them. He is also comparatively fragile in a straight fight; Sunstreaker takes him apart in Dreamwave's Extermination and Kup literally uses his head as a springboard in the movie.

• Shrapnel and Bombshell: his partners and his superiors by default, since leadership rotates between the two of them and never lands on him.
• Megatron: an employer he cheerfully double-crosses. The Insecticons never come under Decepticon command, only under Decepticon catering.
• Humans: his preferred marks, being the most susceptible to the flattery and blackmail he trades in.
• Dirge and the Seekers (Marvel): frequent operational partners on Earth, including guard duty for Soundwave's transmissions.

Marvel starts Kickback on Cybertron as one of Lord Straxus's warriors operating out of Polyhex, and he unknowingly avoids being killed in the Wreckers' Operation: Volcano ambush in "Target: 2006" only because Megatron recalls the group to Earth. He becomes an Insecticon proper after being summoned in "Aerialbots over America!" and is given a mass-shifting power the cartoon never grants him, shrinking to genuine insect size to dodge Jetfire's attack in "The Gift". After that he is largely scenery, hijacking a tanker and standing around Decepticon bases until he disappears following the Underbase saga, presumed deactivated. Dreamwave gives him a pre-Earth dragster alt mode and a nasty habit of provoking friction between Shrapnel and Bombshell. IDW's Hearts of Steel makes him the front of the "Insectrain" with piledrivers for derailing rival locomotives.

Kickback is heavily damaged at the Battle of Autobot City in The Transformers: The Movie after Kup uses his head as a launching ramp, is carried aboard Astrotrain by Long Haul, and is too weak to resist when the fleeing Decepticons jettison him with Megatron, Shrapnel, Bombshell, Skywarp and Thundercracker to lighten the load. Unicron uses the bodies as raw material and Kickback is generally taken to have been reformatted into one of the Sweeps serving Scourge, though the film never assigns specific corpses to specific new bodies. Insecticons continue to appear in 2006 crowd scenes anyway, attributed either to surviving clones or to animators padding out the ranks.

• The toy is a recoloured Diaclone Waruder Battas, an alien-piloted mech, which is where the opening chest compartment comes from; the original Diaclone colours were revived for a later e-Hobby redeco.
• The mould was reused for the Shothole drones, and Kickback's chrome wings went through several running changes, including added rubsign indents on all four wing faces and a shortening of the wings themselves.
• The 2004 Japanese Transformers Collection Insectrons three-pack restored pointed wingtips by dropping the safety circles Hasbro had added, and included energon cube accessories that fit the chest compartments.
• Voiced by Clive Revill in English, an unusually theatrical piece of casting for a background Decepticon.
• In Japan Kickback and the other Insecticons were re-released as mail-order items from 1987 to 1988 at 880 yen plus two robot points.

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.

• Mass-shifting: Marvel has Kickback shrink to true insect size when transforming, while the cartoon keeps the Insecticons at consistent robot scale except when the Nova power core enlarges them.
• Who he became under Unicron. Sweep is the consensus, but the movie never confirms the mapping, and Insecticons keep appearing throughout season three regardless.
• Marvel places him on Cybertron as a Straxus soldier who only becomes an Insecticon after being reformatted on Earth; the cartoon has the trio already insectoid for four million years before Megatron ever meets them.
• The comics variously call him an Insecticon while he is still on Cybertron, a planet the US strip states has no insect life.