Buster Witwicky (G1)
| The name or term "Buster" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see Buster (disambiguation). |
- Buster Witwicky is a human friend of the Autobots from the Generation 1 continuity family.
Unlike his father Sparkplug, Buster Witwicky doesn't understand cars—or for that matter, anything mechanical. Buster prefers reading books, much to the frustration of his father. If only Buster were interested in something useful, like auto repair. Instead, foolish Buster, if he keeps on reading, may end up with a paid scholarship to college. That is a road that could only lead to ruin.
He has an older brother, Spike, who is away at college, and another brother Butch who is just... away. Buster's favorite band is Purple Fungus.[1]
Fiction
Marvel Comics continuity
Buster lived in Portland, Oregon, with his father, Sparkplug Witwicky, in a house adjacent to the family business, S. Witwicky Auto Repairs. One fateful day, Buster returned home late from school, and his father was sore. Buster tried to explain that he sometimes had to work after school at the library because he was in the literary scholarship program, but his father was unimpressed. Despite Buster's mechaniphobia, Sparkplug insisted that Buster be home to help the business. His father worried that his son's nose was stuck in a book, and that he was raising someone oblivious to the real world and its demands of him.
That night, Buster and his girlfriend Jessie were making out at the Community Drive-In (blocking the movie A Kiss for Us from view of his friend "O") when their car was hit from behind by a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. Buster got out to investigate and discovered that the little car was unmanned. There was no one inside! Suddenly, the drive-in theatre became a war zone as jets appeared and attacked. During an explosion, the Beetle was damaged. Buster was stunned to realize the car seemed to be crying (the puss), and leaking a strange substance which was not oil! Buster sent his friends to get help, while he drove the Beetle home, figuring his father could fix it.
His father, Sparkplug, was overjoyed at first when he stumbled across Buster and the Beetle in his garage. Had his son decided to follow in his footsteps? But before Buster could explain, the damaged Volkswagen Beetle spoke to them. "Help me, please! I'm dying!" The Transformers
Buster convinced his father to fix the Autobot, and the boy quickly became friends with him. Buster and Sparkplug became embroiled in the Autobot/Decepticon conflict, and Sparkplug developed a technique to allow Transformers to use Earth fuels that haven't been converted to Energon. When the Decepticons kidnapped Sparkplug and attempted to force him to duplicate the process for them, he tricked them by tampering with the fuel. Sparkplug was rescued before the Decepticon attack on the Autobots thanks to Gears and Spider-Man, but when an argument among the Autobots about his loyalties caused him to suffer a heart attack (though unleashing a wall of flame in front of him didn't help), he was rushed to Greater Portland Medical Center by Ratchet and Buster.
As Sparkplug was tended to by the hospital staff, Buster called his friends Jessie and "O" for support. Later, they were with him when his father woke up. His father explained how he had poisoned the Decepticons' fuel, and the Witwickies assumed they had helped win the Transformers' civil war in absentia. The Last Stand Buster left his father to recuperate and ventured into the hospital's garage to locate Ratchet. After an altercation with the hospital personal, and a note of worry from Ratchet due to a drop in communication from the Ark, Buster went upstairs to say goodbye to his father and accompany Ratchet to the Ark. However, his father had a different idea, and had decided that hanging out with a warring race of alien robots wasn't the best thing for his son. Sparklug made Buster promise to never interact with the Autobots again, and Buster reluctantly accepted. Buster figured one more ride with Ratchet wouldn't hurt, and he traveled with Ratchet to the Ark as previously agreed. But alarmingly, Rumble and Frenzy stood guard outside. What was going on? Buster volunteered to sneak inside to investigate, and in the course of doing so found the severed head of Optimus Prime. The New Order Prime told Buster that he was the only hope for the Autobots, understandably confusing the human. Without explanation, Prime told Buster to disconnect two wires from his head and for Buster to apply them to his own temples. Doing so sent a tremendous surge through Buster and rendered him unconscious for a time. When he woke up, he made his way out of the Ark and reunited with Ratchet, who was horrified to learn of Optimus Prime's fate. The Worse of Two Evils!
Despite promising his father he'd stay out of the Autobots' lives, Buster continued to hang out with Ratchet, if only because both of them needed the emotional support. While traveling through the woods, Ratchet accidentally destroyed the campsite of three college students. Buster introduced his friend to the students, and Ratchet was happy to learn more about Earth from them, but their interaction was cut short when Buster had a strange seizure. Ratchet offered to drive Buster home, but Buster refused, saying he'd stay with the college kids and noting that Ratchet had more important things to worry about. Buster returned to his father's auto service garage with his friends Jessie and "O," since his father's absence was becoming prolonged and someone needed to continue the family business. When Jessie joked that it'd be easy for someone as smart as Buster to figure out how to repair cars, Buster snapped at them both for belittling his father's skills. Angry, he asked them to leave. Warrior School!
Sparkplug had been in the hospital for three weeks, and Buster was at wit's end with the irate customers who needed their cars repaired. Just as he was grousing about his mechanical ignorance again, suddenly, the seizures returned, but this time with a purpose. Buster had an epiphany, and as mechanical parts levitated around him in the garage, he suddenly knew exactly how to fix the service station's cars. DIS-Integrated Circuits! Finally, Sparkplug was released from the hospital, only to find that his son had miraculously fixed all the cars during his absence. After being overjoyed at his son's apparent following in his footsteps, Sparkplug left Buster alone to wonder about how this all was possible. The Next Best Thing to Being There!
Soon, Sparkplug was bringing his son along with all of his work-related duties, such as towing cars off the interstate. Buster angsted about how to tell his father that he never learned how to fix cars the old-fashioned way, but that he had somehow acquired the power to understand and telekinetically manipulate machines of any kind. It must have had something to do with the wires that Optimus Prime had asked him to touch to his temples... Meanwhile, the Decepticon Shockwave came to the same conclusion, and, desiring the life-giving powers of the Creation Matrix within Buster for himself, sent Laserbeak and a lifeless drone, Jetfire, to kidnap him.
Buster was surprised to see Jessie arrive at their home on her bicycle, especially after he'd yelled at her the other day. His dad dismissed Buster from his duties so the two could spend time together, and the pair bicycled away. As Jessie and Buster biked, Buster sensed that Jessie was avoiding discussing their previous argument, and so he used his Creation Matrix powers to unlink her bike's chain. Sure enough, this broke the ice, and the two apologized. And then they "apologized." Their snogging was interrupted by (d'oh!) Buster's father and two Autobots, Bumblebee and Bluestreak, who came to warn them that Buster was being targeted by the Decepticons. Sure enough, Laserbeak and Jetfire arrived and overwhelmed the Autobots. Bumblebee goaded Buster into revealing his hidden power, and at the last moment, Buster used the Creation Matrix to disassemble Jetfire into his component pieces. Buster apologized to his father for deceiving him, and the Autobots enlisted him to help find Optimus Prime's head. Buster reassembled Jetfire and took him under his control. Brainstorm!
After an attempt to infiltrate Shockwave's base to rescue Prime's head backfired, Buster was captured, only to eventually regain control of Jetfire and free Prime. Prime Time!
After passing the Matrix back to Prime, Wheeljack and Ratchet built a robotic exosuit for him, much to Prime's disapproval. In an attempt to prove himself, Buster took the suit and went to the Decepticon Fortress and managed to defeat Frenzy in battle. Unfortunately he was then attacked and pursued by Shockwave. Only the intervention of the Autobots saved his life. Robot Buster!
Buster found himself plagued by dreams in which he encountered a new breed of Transformers. Linking minds with Optimus Prime, it was revealed that the Matrix had left an imprint in his mind of the Special Teams, next generation of combining Transformers. The Decepticons had managed to eavesdrop on the vision and so the designs were also revealed to then. Devastation Derby! Second Generation!
Jetfire later approached Buster, who he felt able to talk to because of the part Buster had played in his creation. A number of errors in judgement had caused him to become concerned that because he had been created on Earth he had a greater loyalty to humans than to the Autobots. Buster was able to convince him that he should be proud to be the first Earth-born Autobot. The Gift
Buster would later play a major role in disabling Ratbat's plan to hypnotize humans into giving fuel to the Decepticons via a chain of car washes (yes, really). Buster Witwicky and the Car Wash of Doom He was also taken hostage by Ratbat in order to prevent the US military from attacking the Decepticons' base (at the time, a starship disguised as a tropical island). Club Con!
Buster's adventures with the Transformers ended soon thereafter, though his brother Spike would play a large role in the Autobot/Decepticon war as well, much to the dismay of Sparkplug (who, understandably, wanted nothing to do with the Transformers any more). It didn't help that when the Aerialbots found Buster, Starscream had left him freezing in the Arctic, as bait for a three-way fight between the Autobots, Ratbat's Decepticons, and Scorponok's Decepticons. Buster's brother Spike, and Spike's partner Fortress Maximus defrosted Buster, who then told Ratbat that Starscream tricked them all, and everyone took off after Starscream- and went straight into a fight against an Underbase-powered Starscream. During the fight, Buster almost froze to death, "accidentally" told Starscream that Prime launched a rocket to the Underbase (the message was "meant" for his brother Spike), was caught in a later firefight between Ratbat and Scorponok, and nearly broke his hand on Hi-Q's helmet. Dark Star
Coloring books
As an adult in the year 2005, Buster had married Jesse and together they bought up their son Daniel. The latter hung out with the Autobots a lot, which his parents were fine with. However, when the Autobots planned a search for a lost crate of energon cubes, Buster and Jesse drew the line and forbade their son to go along. The Lost Treasure of Cybertron
Dreamwave comics continuity
Buster took the death of his father hard. Prime Directive #1 Following the death, Buster racked up enormous gambling debts, which Spike ended up having to pay off. Hardwired Buster subsequently joined the military. Lost and Found
Notes
- "Buster" and "Spike", as well as "Butch", were all names considered for the Witwicky boy character in early production material. One such early document shows Spike as the original name, but crossed off and corrected with "Buster" in pen (in Bob Budiansky's handwriting). According to Jim Shooter, who claims to have created the name "Spike", the change to "Buster" had been mandated by the cartoon producers because it sounded less aggressive.[2] The fact that they ended up using "Spike" in the cartoon anyway is, Jim says, "typical."[3] It is believed that "Butch" was a very, very early name for the character; see Butch Witwicky for a more in-depth explanation.
Foreign names
- Portuguese: Giga Witwicky (Portugal comics), Buster Centelha (Brazil comics)
