As a boy, Roscoe Dillon was fascinated by tops. Dillon became a small time criminal, and while in jail, decided he needed a new, sucessful motif for commiting crimes, so he turned to his love of tops. He created the costumed identity of the Top and learned how to spin himself at unusual speeds just like a Top. Dillon went on to discover that the spinning somehow increased his intelligence and enabled him to devise a wide array of unusual weapons in the form of tops.