October has arrived and in honor of Spooky Season we will spotlight one Monster Transformer per day, each day of the month.

To start it off, our first spotlight is upon Monstructor!

Monstructor is a combiner made up of the inner robots of the Pretender Monsters Icepick, Wildfly, Bristleback, Scowl, Slog, and Birdbrain. Originally named Titanus in some Hasbro documents, at some point before its release its name was finalized as Monstructor.

According to the tech specs and bio of the 1989 toy (included on its combination instructions), Monstructor is one of the more terrifying of the combiners. His very touch causes metal to corrode which allows him to crush and mangle his enemies more easily.

(colorized Tech Specs by Boo)

Monstructor never had an official appearance on the Sunbow cartoon or in the Marvel Comics during G1’s initial run, though his component parts, the Monster Pretenders appeared in the parallel universe future in the US Marvel Transformers issue #67, titled Rhythms Of Darkness.

The closest we got was a very short bit of animation at the beginning of the commercial for the toys, which shows them being created by Pretender Classic Starscream. In Japan, Takara recolored the inner robots and accessories, and gave them cyborg-dinosaur Pretender shells, dubbing them Dino-Force. Takara’s recolored counterpart to Monstructor was named Dinoking, and featured regularly in the Transformers: Victory cartoon.

In 2003, Monstructor was featured in Dreamwave Comics’ Transformers Profile mini-series “More Than Meets The Eye” in issue #4. There he was finally given a motto: “My touch is death”. In this incarnation Monstructor is described as pure evil, desiring to extinguish all life, even his fellow Decepticons. The Dreamwave profile also gave him the added ability of having an energy-draining aura around him, that when charged also casts the surrounding area in darkness. His decomposing touch also applied to carbon-based lifeforms, as well, making his deadly to all lifeforms, organic or mechanical.

During IDW’s run of the Transformers comics, Monstructor was the first combiner, created by Jhiaxus. The result of the comination experiment was an uncontrollable and insane giant, who was imprisoned frequently, only to escape again and again to wreak havok, until the monstrosity was finally felled by Superion and Victorion.

With Dinoking sharing many deign elements and engineering with the current Core Class Dinobot combiner, Volcanicus, it’s possible that we could soon have a new version of Monstructor!

Come back each day to see which monster Transformers is featured as we work our way through October!

You can also click the links below to discuss this and more with other friendly fans on the Axalon Underground Facebook Group and Discord

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