ALLEGIANCE: DECEPTICON
SUB-GROUP: TARGETMASTER
HUMAN COMPONENTS: SINGE AND HAIRSPLITTER
FUNCTION: AERIAL ASSAULT
FIRST APPEARANCE: TRANSFORMERS # 62

"Respect your foes' abilities as you would your own."

Profile: Spinister is as mysterious to his fellow Decepticons as he is to his enemies. He says little about himself and reveals even less. But in action he is as deadly as a computer virus. "I don't care if he never utters another word, as long as he keeps scrapping Autobots," says Decepticon Commander Megatron of this eerie aerial adventurer. "We have enough big-talk, small-results types here already." Spinister's favorite and most effective battle tactic is to sneak up on unwary Autobots, scare them, fly away... and then return to destroy them while their guards are down. How this loner manages to surprise as many opponents as he does is a secret to which not even his commanding officers are privy. But the suspicion among many Decepticons is that Spinister has developed a "cloaking" system - a technology that allows him to turn invisible and avoid detection - that he refuses to share with his comrades... just in case he should decide to one day use it against them.

Spinister is binary-bonded to two Nebulans, Singe and Hairsplitter. Singe was the playboy son of one of Nebulos's leading families. He signed up with the Decepticons soon after he publicly declared his sympathies were with Lord Zarak in his struggle against Zarak's Nebulan rival, Galen, and the Autobots. Singe was motivated by his feelings for Zarak's daughter, Llyra, whose affections he had lost years earlier to Galen. He saw the opportunity to destroy Galen as his chance to win her back. But once he went into exile with his fellow Decepticon-allied Nebulans he had no opportunity to put his theory into effect, leaving him a bitter, lonely hate-filled warrior.

Hairsplitter is just happy to be in an organization in which he feels wanted. On Nebulos he was an ecological efficiency expert whose job primarily consisted of writing memos that pinpointed waste in the Nebulos Department of the Environment and assigned blame to those bureaucrats responsible for the waste. He was not very popular among his co-workers. He agreed to undergo the bio-engineering process that would binary bond him to Spinister when Lord Zarak told him that his talent for spotting slackers would be welcomed by Scorponok, commander of the contingent of Decepticons on Nebulos.

Abilities: Spinister transforms into an assault helicopter equipped with two batteries of automatic particle beam cannons and two remote control-guided fusion bombs. His maximum speed is 520 miles per hour and his range is 1300 miles. Singe converts to a double-barrelled nuclear-powered flamethrower. He can adjust the heat in his flame so that he can do anything from lightly toasting a target at temperatures in the 140 degrees Fahrenheit range to melting an enemy Autobot into a pool of slag at temperatures up to 3200 degrees. Hairsplitter converts to twin lock-target laser rifles. He is renowned for his accuracy and has been known to etch his name on a microchip positioned two miles away with his laser beams. Spinister can use both weapons in robot and helicopter modes. He can also combine the two Nebulans to form one super-weapon, which retains the offensive features of its component parts.

Weaknesses: Spinister's rotor blades are prone to stress fractures after 12,000 miles of continued use. The blades require a vigilant maintenance schedule to avoid inflight failure.