Grimlock (G1)/2005 IDW continuity
Me Grimlock play big part in IDW Generation 1 continuity too!
| “ | Will he be pleased to see us? | ” |
| “ | Hell no. He's never pleased to see anyone. | ” |
IDW Generation 1 continuity
Joining the Autobots
Grimlock of Iacon was a forged heavy-weight class Point One Percenter. The Divided Self Arm the Lonely He has been a warrior for millennia, although not always an obedient one. He was languishing in a military brig after angering a field commander when he met a fellow detainee named Slag, and started swapping stories. Slag had shot a vice-admiral in the back to con him into a frontal assault, so Slag won the conversation. Grimlock thought this Slag guy sounded like a good bloke, and the two of them discussed the formation of their own rule-breaking strike team, the Dynobots. Maximum Dinobots #2 Grimlock and the Dynobots would go on to serve under the Primal Vanguard Rage as a covert strike force, carrying out over 200 missions under the command of Nominus Prime and receiving numerous commendations.
Everything changed, however, when the team was sent to investigate a tunnel network below the Toraxxis Plains. Set upon by powerful cyber-morphic predators, the Dynobots were forced to use technology developed by their medic, Skar, to scan the creatures and match their power. These new alternate modes gave the team the edge needed to defeat their assailants, Underworld but Grimlock, unable to control the rage induced by his monstrous form, inadvertently killed Skar. Massacre On returning to base, the Dynobots were placed in quarantine for the study of their altered bodies, but overwhelmed with grief and a feeling of betrayal, they staged an escape and went on the run. Underworld
Having fallen from grace, the Dynobots began fighting in the gladiatorial pits. Rage There, the likes of Scorponok regarded Grimlock as one of the greatest gladiators the pits had ever produced, having personally fought him one-on-one. Soundwaves At the start of Megatron's rise to power, the Dynobots turned out to an open casting call for Megatron's underground gladiatorial games, and got a good deal more respect from the Predacons than the other attendees. It turned out to be a recruitment drive for the Decepticon army. What they thought of that is unknown, as Autobot security forces raided the party soon after. Megatron Origin #3. While Megatron would mark Grimlock as a potential Decepticon of great potential, he was also acutely aware that for all his strength, Grimlock possessed a "flaw": compassion. Rage
"And that's the way we LIKE it!"
Later, Grimlock and the Dynobots were in Ironfall, at the Ring of Trials, when they heard Optimus Prime's call to arms against the new Decepticon insurrectionist government. The Dynobots responded on the side of the Autobots, and joined in the march on Megatron's citadel. Broadcast During the battle, Grimlock and his Dynobots took out a lot of tanks, sneering at the Decepticons' definition of "armored". Endgame
Not long after Megatron's defeat, the Dynobots once again disappeared from the radar and took to robbing energon reserves supplies, receiving intel from Swindle. After a raid proved less successful then had been hoped, Grimlock throttled an explanation from Swindle, who admitted that intelligence had suffered in the now Scorponok-dominated Decepticons. Releasing the Decepticon, Grimlock fretted over the idea that the longer the Dynobots remained on Cybertron, the greater the risk their unstable alternate modes posed to the populace. Derelicts Tempers in the Dynobot ranks soon flared as Slag accused Grimlock of dragging them from small-time raid to small-time raid because he enjoyed their life on the run. The pair began to loose their tempers, but were talked down by Swoop, who feared what would happen if they transformed. Their next raid was at the Toraxxis mega-refinery. While they broke in, they were hindered by remote sentries until Grimlock killed their controller. Once they had captured the refinery, Grimlock ordered they wait for Snarl to bring a truck to drain the energon. Wreckage
Tempers continued to flare until a furious Slag seemingly abandoned his comrades, but returned at sunrise just as Scorponok's Decepticons arrived in their own bid to raid the refinery. However, Grimlock had triggered the refinery's alarm during the fight and summoned back-up in the form of the Autobots. Faces of Darkness
Using the arrival of the Autobots as a distraction, the Dynobots made their escape, followed by Scorponok, Blitzwing, Dai Atlas and Orion. Scorponok and Blitzwing managed to get ahead, and as Scorpnok ordered Blitzwing to attack, Grimlock mocked him for hiding behind artillery. The two former gladiators clashed, the fight driving Grimlock into a rage. After stabbing Scorponok, Grimlock began to lose control, battering the Decepticon to the ground. As he advanced on his prey, Grimlock began to change into his bestial form, with his eyes changing from yellow to red and bladed ridges bursting through his exoskeleton. The Dynobots tried to restrain him, but he seemed to have lost control completely, crying out he'd kill them all. He was brought back to his senses by a shot from Orion. Grimlock begged Optimus to let him leave, but when the Autobot leader refused, Grimlock threatened to blow the refinery up, killing everyone there. By appealing to his better nature, Optimus managed to talk Grimlock down, but this only allowed Scorponok to attempt the very same thing. Rage Grimlock survived the subsequent explosion, but was left wandering the ashen blast crater alone. Fallout
Eventually, Grimlock was found by both Kup and his teammates, who, with some difficulty, managed to convince him that Optimus Prime could be able to help the "cursed" Dynobots. Prey They met up with the Prime at Starsreach Spaceport, where a mass exodus of neutral Cybertronians was occurring, but the entire group was caught in a Decepticon aerial bombardment ordered by Scorponok. Enraged, Grimlock fully transformed into his beast mode and attacked the Decepticon ground forces, Massacre with such vigor that they effected a full retreat. Still in a fury, it took Optimus to subdue and calm Grimlock sufficiently for him to revert to robot mode. Despite Prime's efforts to convince them otherwise, the Dynobots proceeded with their plan to get themselves away from Cybertron, leaving the spaceport in a shuttle. Unleashed
However, an ancient monster appeared on the surface not long afterwards, accompanied by the same predators that the Dynobots had fought beneath Toraxxis. Unwilling to leave the Autobots to their fate, Grimlock turned the ship around and air-dropped with his team to the surface, where they were able to fight off the smaller beasts. When Megatron approached a wounded Optimus Prime, Grimlock leapt to the rescue. Engrossed in combat, neither the Dynobot or Decepticon noticed Trypticon lean down towards them, and the creature swallowed them whole. Annihilation
Trapped inside the monster, the two enemies were attacked by more of the dragon-beasts, revealing to Grimlock that they were generated from inside Trypticon. Agreeing to a temporary alliance to escape alive, Megatron and Grimlock fought their way to the beast's plasma-core, where they found vast containers of an aggression and power-boosting energon substance. With Megatron covering him, Grimlock went to destroy the reservoirs, but was halted when proximity to the volatile fuel began increasing his rage. Fighting through the impulses the Dynobot cleaved open the tanks, felling Trypticon. Emerging just after Megatron, Grimlock found Prime close to death, and decided to let his battle with Megatron wait until another day so the wounded Autobots could be taken to safety. As they retreated, leaving the inert Trypticon in Decepticon hands, Grimlock asked Jetfire for his help in curing the Dynobots. Belly of the Beast
Though Grimlock was worst off among the Dynobots, Autobot scientists were eventually able to purify his corrupted energon and re-engineer his original altmode, curing him. He was sent to check up on Trypticon's body together with Hot Rod, but the optimism of the young recruit got on his nerves and an argument broke out between the two when he accused Hot Rod of not understanding pain and guilt. They quickly shut up upon noticing that Trypticon had disappeared. Primacy #1 The beast soon reappeared from the depths of space on a collision course with Iacon, prompting an emergency security meeting which Grimlock attended. Primacy #2 Once this turned out to be the first step of a Decepticon invasion plan, he took to the battlefield, fighting Junkions and Sharkticons before being confronted by Blackwall, an old rival from his gladiator days. Primacy #3 Though outpowered in hand-to-hand combat, Grimlock prevailed by stabbing Blackwall in the head with his sword, proclaiming he was better at fighting dirty. He then gathered his Dynobots and led them into battle against the Predacons, saving Hot Rod from the beasts and personally breaking Razorclaw's jaws off. Primacy #4
At some point during the war, Grimlock was a Decepticon. He eventually went back to the Autobots. Animals
On Earth
In no small part due to Grimlock's influence, the Dynobots remained a group of close knit hunters and guardsmen who preferred to work outside the Autobot rulebook, though still on the same side. Grimlock was among the Autobots fighting atop the Decepticon warship Hell's Point during a particularly brutal fight. The Gloaming After Shockwave destroyed a cache of energon the Dynobots had been hoarding, causing them severe energon burns and equally severe humiliation, they swore revenge. So, against orders from Optimus Prime, they followed Shockwave when he left Cybertron to stabilize "Ultra-Energon" deposits he had sent to other worlds as a precaution against the depletion of Cybertron's own energon reserves.
When Shockwave reached his first destination—Earth, at the end of the last Ice Age—the Dynobots destroyed his ship, but Slag revealed that the high energon levels of the planet would put them in stasis lock, since they hadn't come prepared like Shockwave. Slag then came up with the idea that they should scan the local life forms and create alt modes based on those animals, but with synthetic flesh coatings to protect against the high levels of energon radiation. Grimlock was completely against the idea, but since Slag couldn't come up with something better, he relented. However, he refused to take on the form of the weak mammalians that dominated the planet, demanding "something with some... bite." Scanning fossil deposits, Slag found the remains of some extinct reptilian animals and brought up a holographic representation of one to see if Grimlock approved. What popped up was a Tyrannosaurus rex, which Grimlock seemed to fall in love with the moment he saw it. The choice made, Grimlock took the Tyrannosaur as his altmode and had Slag find more dinosaurs as templates for the rest of the Dynobots.
On teleporting down to the planet's surface to confront Shockwave, they gained an initial advantage, as Shockwave's logic was unable to comprehend the effort and risks they had taken for their revenge. However, when Shockwave recognized this weakness, he shut down his logic processors and executed a "rage" program to enable him to operate on pure instinct. He shrugged off the Dynobots' attacks and beat them severely, ending the assault by burning off their organic coatings. Unable to accept another defeat, Grimlock transformed to robot mode and fought against his imminent stasis lock to no avail.
However, before leaving the Dynobots' ship, he had enabled a "dead man's switch" designed to take Shockwave with them if they were defeated. When he entered stasis lock, this failsafe activated, firing on a nearby dormant volcano and causing an eruption which buried Shockwave and the Dynobots under ash and lava. Thousands of years later, their entombed bodies were discovered by a human archaeological team. Spotlight: Shockwave
Daylight come and me Grimlock wanna go home.
Thousands of years later in 2007, the human organization Skywatch took over jurisdiction of the dig site and excavated Shockwave and the Dynobots. Escalation #5
When the Reapers attacked the Decepticons, Skywatch decided to awaken the most advanced of their "Eureka Six", which turned out to be Grimlock. Devastation #5 Devastation #6
Grimlock's reactivation was sabotaged by an agent of the Machination and when he awoke, they had no control over him. He escaped the facility, confused and angry. His escape was engineered by the head of the Machination, Scorponok, who wanted Grimlock to join him in the Machination plot to dominate the Earth by running interference and delaying Megatron's plans long enough for the Machination to put their plans into action.
Grimlock considered for a second, but refused the offer for two reasons: he could turn Scorponok in to Ultra Magnus for redemption, and as revenge for Scorponok once robbing an installation the Dynobots were guarding. The two fought and Scorponok quickly gained the upper hand, mostly due to his Headmaster upgrade. Grimlock was able to activate his transporter chip, which beamed him back to his ship, the Skyfire, which was buried deep in ice somewhere. Grimlock hoped he could use the ship to find the other Dynobots. Spotlight: Grimlock
Finding himself trapped, both on a useless ship and in a less than inconspicuous form, Grimlock was forced to try and contact some of his less reputable acquaintances in an attempt to get the Skyfire into some sort of working order. Meanwhile, the Machination had tracked him down and had sent their Tsunami Unit to apprehend him. Grimlock's early warning system detected them, and he circled round as they began to attack, bursting from the ice and transforming. The battle very quickly turned in his favor with four of the clones falling in the opening moments. The surviving Headmasters were rather shaken, but managed to fulfill their mission: attach a device which would orbital bounce him to Nevada, near Skywatch's base. Grimlock materialized in the middle of a busy street in Fallon. As a car crashed into his toe, he realized things had just gone from bad to worse. Maximum Dinobots #1
Grimlock knew Scorponok was trying to deliberately set him up as a rampaging monster, but didn't expect his fellow Dynobots to be sent to take him down! He was able to fight them all off but unable to break their reprogramming by appealing to their team ethos...and when they did regain sentience and memory, it was because Scorponok let them so they could get pissed off at the knowledge Grimlock had set up a "dead man's switch" without informing them. Grimlock's defence was that such a sneaky, amoral and rule-breaking act was what the Dynobots were all about, which surprisingly worked. While saying this, he grudgingly and with much moaning saved a human from burning to death. Maximum Dinobots #2
Convinced he'd brought his team round, Grimlock began issuing orders, only to be met by an icy silence. Swoop spoke for the group, saying his trust was hard earned and Grimlock tossed it away. Disgusted he abandoned the team, prompting the others to follow. Grimlock tried pleading with them, then turned in a huff, stating he'd be better off on his own. He was interrupted by the arrival of the Sunstreaker clones, who blasted him in the chest. Enraged, he vented his frustrations on the clones until their numbers began to tell. He was saved by the arrival of the other Dynobots, who felt that whatever had happened, they were still a team. However, they were overwhelmed by the sheer number of clones, until the arrival of the "help" Grimlock had requested earlier: the Monsterbots. Seeing the newcomers take the fight to the enemy, Grimlock extolled his unit to show the Monsterbots how it's really done. Decimated and demoralized, the surviving Machination clones escaped with their lives. Maximum Dinobots #3
Aboard the Monsterbots' ship, the Dynobots wondered why Grimlock would side with the outcasts. They gave Grimlock a stern look when he exited the cockpit. The Dynobots didn't see the point of fighting Scorponok, but Grimlock said that Scorponok made it their fight when he turned the Dynobots against him. Snarl disagreed, saying that it had always been Grimlock's fight, that he and the other Dynobots went along with him, and that it was now Grimlock's wounded pride at stake. After the Monsterbots blasted away the defenses, Grimlock exited the ship, saying that there was no way he could let this go, and that with or without the Dynobots, there would be a reckoning for Scorponok. The Dynobots decided that arguing was pointless and followed Grimlock. When Hunter O'Nion pulled the cords from Sunstreaker's head, shutting him down, the clones ceased to function. Sludge cried out in victory, but the moment was short-lived as Scorponok blasted Sludge into stasis. Maximum Dinobots #4
Grimlock stared down at Sludge's dead body, brooding about how it was his fault Sludge was dead... while a battle between Scorponok and Shockwave (for rights of revenge upon Grimlock) raged on around him. Eventually Snarl, Slag, and Swoop decide to get to the Monsterbots' ship while the getting was good, but Grimlock stayed behind with Sludge. Grimlock tried infusing some of his spark energy into Sludge to revive him, but it seemed to have no effect. Shockwave got the upper hand and let Scorponok escape, and in frustration, Grimlock attacked Shockwave. Grimlock and Shockwave were too busy fighting to notice the return of Slag, Snarl, and Swoop, who reasoned that, while helping Grimlock might not be much of a cause, it still beat being no better than the Monsterbots. They were noticed by Sludge, who seemed to have recovered due to Grimlock's treatment after all. The four of them dove into the fray proper, but Grimlock ordered them to go after Scorponok instead. When Hot Rod was about to get squished by Scorponok, the remaining Dynobots showed up in just the nick of time. At Hot Rod's urgings, Swoop severed the connections keeping Scorponok's head conscious. Grimlock in the mean time had found out Shockwave was using their battle to stall for time so that Soundwave could free him from Skywatch's control. The Decepticon attempted to abandon the fight, but Grimlock stubbornly refused to let him walk away, and rolled out a grenade, which incapacitated them both.
By this time Ultra Magnus had arrived and taken Scorponok into custody. Grimlock and Shockwave were both arrested and taken off-world. Ultra Magnus later told Grimlock that having Scorponok and Shockwave in custody could help offset Grimlock's own sentence. Grimlock wasn't interested, asking only that the blame was put squarely on him and that the other Dynobots' warrants were cancelled. Magnus agreed, and Grimlock was left to muse on the fact that Sludge and his team were alive and well, thanks to him. Maximum Dinobots #5
Grimlock was taken to Garrus-9. However, shortly afterward, Overlord and the Predators launched a devastating assault on the detention facility and seized control of it. Prisoners and guards, Autobots and Decepticons alike, were made to fight for Overlord's amusement... except for Grimlock, who Overlord kept alive and forced to watch footage of the pit fights. Snare believed the experience may have driven him mad. By the time the Wreckers arrived to free Garrus-9, Grimlock had disappeared from the facility under unknown circumstance. Last Stand of the Wreckers #4
After the war
"No, this is how you play God".
Grimlock resurfaced a few years later, discovered in a stasis tube in a crashed Worldsweeper spacecraft on the planet Clemency by a ragtag Decepticon group known as the Scavengers. Rules of Disengagement These Decepticons had made themselves targets for the Decepticon Justice Division, and quickly decided to use Grimlock to their advantage, awakening him with a dose of circuit speeders that drove him into a ferocious rage, and pointing him in the direction of their hunters. Unfortunately, after a brief burst of violence and success against Tarn and Kaon, Grimlock all but stopped fighting following a blow from Tesarus, and would have been destroyed by the weaponized speech of Tarn if the battle had not prematurely ended when their opponents picked up the trail of bigger game and departed. In the aftermath, when the speeders had worn off, the Scavengers discovered that Grimlock was heavily brain damaged, and decided to take him with them, believing they could use him as a bargaining chip when and if they got back to Cybertron. Who's Afraid of the DJD?
Later, aboard the Weak Anthropic Principle on the planet Constancy, Grimlock was playing a game similar to Jenga whilst completely oblivious to the effects of Tyrest's universal killswitch on his shipmates. Arm the Lonely
At some point in the months after this, Grimlock and the Scavengers became caught in a perspective trap. As the Scavengers continued on their madcap adventures, Misfire attempted to rehabilitate the Dinobot, to little success beyond some mild increases in cohesion. The rest of the time Grimlock remained as he was, incapable of speaking and prone to random fits of brief violence.
One such fit caused Grimlock to randomly attack Misfire as the 'bot tried helping him learn to spell, interrupting a speech by Krok, which forced the Scavengers to blast him into submission. Before the Scavengers could devolve into violence, a transmission from Demus interrupted them, with an offer. Leaving Grimlock behind on the crashed W.A.P., they went to meet Demus, who tempted them with the prospect of buying Grimlock. The vote turned in favor of selling the Dinobot. The matter quickly became moot when Fortress Maximus blew his head up. Some Of My Best Friends Are Autobots
To protect himself, Crankcase made Grimlock's signal visible to Fort Max, who decided it was better to go after the former G-9 inmate. When the duly appointed enforcer of the Tyrest Accords arrived at the W.A.P., Grimlock was in the middle of writing something. He soon attacked Fort Max, who believed Grimlock had turned 'con again. Their battle was cut short when the Scavengers appeared and talked Max out of fighting by explaining their story with Grimlock. Maximus proposed bringing the Dinobot to Luna 1 to Misfire's agreement, but he was met with objection from Spinister, who noted that they should ask Grimlock his opinion; to which he managed to sputter out Misfire's name. After bluffing Maximus into leaving the planet with the Roboids, the Scavengers returned to space in the Weak Anthropic Principle. Misfire, having lost a game of "Shoot Shoot Bang Bang", escorted Grimlock to his quarters and was left stunned when the Dinobot replied to him, but the Decepticon failed to notice what he'd drawn before Max had shown up: a gear-shaped symbol and writing the message "PREPARE - CONFRONT - REPEL". Animals
Grimlock would later watch the disturbing last will and testament of several of the Lost Light crew. How Bright Their Frail Deeds Unknown to him, shortly after they recorded those, Drift had had a vision of himself, Grimlock, and Rodimus standing against an apocalyptic threat, with "PREPARE - CONFRONT - REPEL" inscribed before them in Ancient Cybertronian. Some Other Cybertron
When the Scavengers paid a brief visit to Earth, specifically the Texas region, Grimlock recognised this as the place he'd last seen the other Dinobots. Unable to articulate his reasons, he escaped the ship and inadvertently smashed up several human towns (injuring dozens of people) in an attempt to get to Dallas. Misfire found him digging up his old sword, the names of his comrades inscribed, before he sadly handed it to the Decepticon. After consoling him, Misfire told Grimlock that he was thrilled to see he'd recovered a memory, something he'd assumed was impossible. Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again!
