Crankcase

Crankcase is a Decepticon Transformer who debuted during Marvel's original Transformers comic run. A member of the Decepticon Pretenders faction known as the Mayhem Attack Squad, he operates as one of Cybertron's villainous warriors battling the Autobots on Earth.

Crankcase rolled onto the scene in 1989's The Transformers #48, a Copper Age creation from the legendary Bob Budiansky and José Delbo during Marvel's landmark run with the franchise. Though their catalog footprint is modest, this Transformer has kept genuinely elite company — sharing pages with titans like Optimus Prime, Megatron, Shockwave, and Prowl across a mythology that has proven remarkably durable, stretching all the way into the 2020s through collections like Transformers Compendium and Transformers: Regeneration One 100-Page Spectacular. For devoted Transformers completists, Crankcase represents exactly the kind of deep-cut discovery that makes digging into the Marvel run so rewarding — a character born in the thick of the battle between Autobots and Decepticons, preserved in some of the most celebrated corners of the extended canon.