WIP: Rogue, 6 Month Gap

Yellow Week continues with a custom that went really quickly because the color scared me into a simple approach. But that’s okay; I like how this turned out, and it took only a few hours over a few days.


I showed the WIP for Rogue a few days ago, and talked about where this costume comes from. The base is ML6 Phoenix, because all the major colors match up. I needed to sand down the shoulders to prevent paint rub, but their shape now approximates that of newer sculpts like Psylocke and Wasp, so I’m happy. I’ve added some milliput to the tops of the boots and gloves to break up the lines of the limbs and make things a tad more interesting. The face and neck is XTreme Rogue, with DCSH Supergirl bangs and a Wildcats Zealot ponytail.

Holy crap, this is the last day of Yellow Week! And as I sat around in training this week at work, I thought up a plan for making March X-Men Month here at Glued Fingers. I have all these X-Men customs planned, mostly to mesh with the X-Men figures announced by Hasbro at the Ney York Comic Con, so I'll get them all out the way this month. Ergo, I've got to post at some point.

Sad thing is, I've been really productive and have a lot of material for this blog, but all my dremelling, epoxying, and the like have kept me away from my computer. So, March is X-Men month, and I'll get into things next week with a finished Mimic, an Astonishing Beast, a modern Nightcrawler, and other stuff in blue and yellow.

WIP: Firestar

Yellow Week continues with a character that’s all goddamn yellow, and I have no idea how it turned out this well. It’s possible the year completion time is a small factor... but I did move in the middle of that.


This is Firestar in the outfit she wore through most of her appearances in the Busiek/Perez Avengers run. The base is a Street Fighters Cammy, with a MAC series 1 Buffy head. The sculpts back then weren’t scanned, and went through a bunch of revisions before getting approval, and ended up not being very accurate. So they work as generic sculpts, whereas modern Buffy heads are rooted in the actress likeness and look weird. Also Firestar has a mask, and that helps.

The Firestar custom demands yellow in the elbows, knees, hips, ab crunch, and the underside on the shoulders… these are all problem areas! And the base I used, while not colored in dark plastic, had no yellow itself. I tried an airbrush, and got a really smooth application, but then I moved and the paint chipped. I repaired it with brushwork: undercoats of a light yellow, and a finish of yellow airbrush paint, brushed on.

This is an important custom for me, as it was the first work I finished in 2007, after a long hiatus of being unable to finalize anything. Oh wait, I said in the title this was still a WIP. But all it needs is sealing; I’m done with the major work.

WIP: Mimic

Yellow Week continues with a character that's just brimming with the color: Mimic from Exiles.


This recipe is designed around avoiding paint rub, and little else. Still, I think the parts are going to work together. The ball joints in the hips and the shoulders won't need painting; nor the elbows, knees, ankles, wrists… everything but the ab crunch, which seems to be taking paint pretty well. I started with Street Fighters Ken in Yellow, which was available for a discount for about the last year and a half. I've got a bad habit of buying figures with yellow joints just in case: I've got two of these Kens, and three or four Pyros; and hey, I've used both of those in customs! Anyway, I had a bad experience with Street Fighter shoulders getting paint rub, so I found an upper torso with blue shoulders. The build and color combination forced me
into DCSH Superman, but that's a pretty good choice. For the legs, I was going to sculpt musculature onto the Ken legs, but decided to use Wolverine parts instead, because my sculpting still needs some work. The head is a cast of DC Direct JLA Aquaman. I'll be trying to have this done by next weekend.

I knew in the back of my head that the best base for Mimic wasn't this Frankenstein, it was Sentry from the ML Wal-Mart wave. But I hadn't done any construction in a while and was getting restless… also, it's the coolest thing in the world when someone presents a custom on the Internet with a build that you've never seen before. One can admire the craftsmanship in a Black Panther repaint, but those crazy combinations, or especially new sculpts, really get the blood up.

Hmm, those boots may have to go. Wolverine had this gimpy left leg that he passed on, and Mimic has big Beast-feet anyway. Sadly I can't think of a good way to keep the boot swivel, as the Wolverine legs have it right at the ankle.

Yellow Week Part 1: I am Furious at Yellow

I hate yellow.

As I begin this blog, I’m covering the central tenants of my customizing manifesto. Toy Fair, MACH-1, and now, the horrors of the color yellow.

Carl on the Fwoosh did a really great Bishop custom in 2005, seen here. As his writeup explains, he wanted to use as much of the old 5” Missile Fliers Bishop as possible, but in a six-inch scale. He did so because that toy was great. The big clunky boots and gloves had an aesthetic that Marvel Legends can’t capture today: it was manga-influenced without being Huberto-Ramos-crapped-out. But, he also did it to avoid dipping his brush into the color yellow. Check out the text: he snipped off the gloves and boots, got a belt from Cable, and then made stripes with yellow paper, which is awesome, because it’s one of the smoothest decoupage jobs I’ve seen. “Anytime I achieve yellow without having to paint it, is listed as a victory for me,” he wrote. I read that at the time and thought, “Amen, brother,” (though brother implies some continuity of talent, and I’ve got a ways to go). But back then I knew the pain of this demon pigment, and as future projects went awry, I thought of the passage often.

You can see yellow paints next to red, orange, or green paints on the shelf and never think that they conceal any shortcomings. It’s a primary color, after all, and seems just like its brethren in the pot. But brush it on and yellow refuses to form an opaque layer. It’s exceedingly transparent; I’ve had it look muddy over a white base coat. It demands several layers, to the point at which it flakes off, or more accurately, crust erodes from the mainland, as soon as joints are moved. I knew this, when I started a Jim Lee costume Jean Grey a year ago, but forgot the tenuous transparency. Or maybe I didn’t forget it, but trusted in technology to fix the issue.

Jean Grey, in her yellow-and-blue stupid 90s suit with the useless pads, is the one entry missing from our blue/gold X-teams. She’s consistently at the top of Marvel Legends request lists, but it looks like she won’t be made in 2007. In early 2006, I tried to make a Jean Grey custom myself. I actually had one before, made from a Spider-Man body with Bride-of-Venom shoulders… but it was showing it’s age, and female bases were now more plentiful, so I tried to repeat the effort with an ML6 Phoenix base. My secret weapon was Krylon Fusion. This is special spray paint, and the factor that makes it special is a chemical, which is to say, some invisible process. In the new Pynchon, he has a bit about physical and chemical processes, “As a mechanic he respected any straightforward chain of cause and effect you could see or handle, but chemical reactions like this went down in some region too far out of anyone's control, they were something you had to stand around and just let happen, which was as interesting as watching corn grow." Corn grow, paint dry, same thing. Also, fellow Pynchon readers will note that this quote is within the first 100 pages of Against the Day, which has been out for months, ergo I’ve been cutting up toys instead of reading novels.

Anyway, Krylon Fusion contains Magic Chemicals that Bond to Plastic. It’s all so seductive! This stuff sounded like dye in a can! Have you seen what these Transformers customizers do? They’re working with these engineered plastic pieces that have to rub and fold and can’t possibly take paint, so they disassemble the toy and dye the pieces to the desired color. That sounds cool! You can’t have paint rub if you haven’t used paint. But reading their information, I ran afoul at Rule One: Have one pot for dye, and one pot for food. I knew then and there that this technique wasn’t for me.

But Krylon Fusion wasn’t a die, just a paint that claimed to apply and bond and never let go. So paint must touch plastic. It stood to figure that the super-paint eschewed the normal base-coating process, which would involve putting the yellow down on white paint. So I went out and sprayed an ML Phoenix with Fusion Yellow. It didn’t work… if the paint bonded, it didn’t obscure the green underneath. I put coat after coat on there, until I had a nice solid yellow, but obtaining it took at least two millimeters of paint.

Of course, that much paint started to chip immediately. The ball hips were particularly bad. I tried to sand off the paint, reduce the plastic, and try again, but it never looked even… no, that’s too kind. It never looked anything besides awful. So the custom sat, stinking of spray paint and never completed.

Recently I revisited the scene of the crime. I cracked the torso, hips, etc of the yellow Phoenix and took a look at the paint, now so thick it was obscuring sculpting detail. I sanded it all off until I could see yellow plastic, and reassembled the figure. Ah, but this time, I spliced in the ball hips from yellow-pants himself, ML13 Pyro. Paint rub isn’t bad on most joints, but on the shoulders and hips, it’s awful. If I can find a piece that’s factory made in the desired color, it’s worth the effort of Frankenstein parts together.

Here’s Jean Grey, all assembled. The head is Sniper Wolf, my preferred Jean Grey face. The hair is the rubber Phoenix hair. The shoulder pads were originally parts of a boot, and much longer, but they’re very flexible and had a lot of surface with which to secure them to the shoulder. The yellow is all brushed on.

Since then, I’ve relearned the importance of base coats. Of course, a yellow figure gets a base coat of white primer. Next, I use a faux-yellow. I like a yellow-white, although some prefer a yellow-brown. This is the mystery of yellow, that in its pure form, it cannot coat, yet the slightest chromatic deviation will act like a normal paint. Over the white-yellow goes the actual yellow I desired, obtained with a bottle of airbrush paint. I love this stuff! Although I’m a bit hesitant to actually use it in an airbrush, because I can’t get my stream fine enough to avoid overspray. But brushed-on airbrush paint is seamless, shiny, and beautiful.

That's my dissertation on yellow. All this week I'll be working on customs that have been shaped, quite significantly, by trying to avoid painting yellow. Some others represent a triumph of the mechanical over the chemical: big swaths of yellow paint with no joint rub. I guess these will mostly be X-Men customs, because they're full of stupid yellow.

WIP: MACH-3

I'm not calling this done, because it's not sealed and every time I look at it it needs more silver and it's too cold to spraypaint anything. But here's MACH-III, in an advanced WIP form... that is to say, almost done.



I was at a gaming store today, the Compleat Strategist in Falls Church, VA, picking up some Heroclix for a game this weekend. I heard a familiar sound, and looked up to see the clerk shaking a can of spray paint. He left us in the store, walked outside with a shoebox in one hand, and sprayed a basecoat on some miniatures. So:

A) It's not too cold to spray, or, at the very least, I'll get to seal this stuff soon.

B) That was an awesome spray setup, I'll have to adopt it. Action figure customizers are always having to leave their figures outside, and once somebody's Toad got stolen, I read it on Internet.

C) There's been a real change in the management at Compleat Strategist since I was there last, at least three years ago. You can tell because my story featured a clerk that stood up, quickly moved outside, then rejoined us in the store. Far too much movement than what I was used to. Last time I got the most morbidly obese of a truely epic set of hobby store clerks. I never saw the guy get up, and he, rather amazingly when I recall it, hammered out my order on the cash register using a typing cane.

Anyway, bravo, Compleat Strategist, and I need a shoebox post haste.

WIP: Rogue, 6 Month Gap

I have a real weakness for the 6-Month Gap uniforms in the X-Men books, from X-Men 100 until what, 110? The story is: in 2000 or so, the X-Men movie comes out, and artist Leinil Francis Yu designs new costumes for everybody inspired by the leather look from the movie. Except he's really unfocused and ends up with some great traditional superhero looks; for some characters, the most iconic look they've ever had. But nobody remembers or wants to remember these books, because the writing was done by Chris Claremont, making his first return to the X-books. For year after Scott-Lobell year, fans said, "Bring Caremont back, he'll fix everything!" It was at this point that Claremont proved either that he had become a worthless hack, or that he had always been a worthless hack and no one had noticed for all those years.

Anyway, really bad comics but great designs, and my favorite Rogue costume. Here's a link to it on the old UncannyXmen.net site. It's her only costume with an X motif, and uses her traditional colors. I really wanted to do this custom using the newest Rogue figure, the XTreme X-Men outfit toy that Toybiz did in its last gasps of the Marvel license. But that toy has these really tight hip joints that were going to paint rub like crazy. In contrast, Marvel Legends 6 Phoenix matches the colors of this costume in nearly every joint. It's kind of an old sculpt, only the second ML female, and parts like the shoulders can't hold up to modern figures... but no paint rub!



Here's the custom about five minutes in. The head and neck of an XTreme Rogue have been hacked off and glued to a Phoenix torso. I've painted a slightly darker green on the legs and arms, and added the beginning of the X in white. I've got a plan for the hair, and I can tell I'll have to sand the shoulders to avoid rub there. The original design, according to some pamphlet Marvel put out at the time, was meant to be evocative of the movie by having the yellow represent heavy leather boots and gloves. I may build up the rim of the yellow zones with rubber bands to reflect this... and also to add some complexity to a repaint. Regardless, the custom should come together pretty quickly.

WIP: Monica Rambeau

Here's a WIP of a new figure: Monica Rambeau in her Nextwave uniform.



The body is a Spider-Man figure... I've mentioned how in 2003 I did a few of these Spider-Man to female body conversions, using the shoulders and upper torso of a 6-inch female figure, and Spider-Man for the rest. I had a Storm custom using this recipe, but Marvel Legends Series 8 announced that the character was coming out, and I just stopped work. So this custom never got to my shelf, and was already painted white...

More on this custom, especially the hair, as it progresses.

MACH-Day, Part Two

In my last blog entry I talked about MACH-1 and MACH-2, two Thunderbolts characters I'd like to make custom figures of. But I'm actually near completion on a MACH-III custom, representing the armor that Abe gets in TBolts issue Continuing a look at the various MACH armors that Abner Jenkins has worn over the years in the Thunderbolts comic, we come to MACH-III.

MACH-III is probably a Patrick Zircher design; Zircher drew him first, anyway. There’s parts of it that are definite Bagley homages, like the faux-rebreather and the fused fingers. This design is has the only element in all four armors that pisses me off: the asymmetrical slant in the chest armor. What the hell? Does Abe need to lean to his right all the time? Is he always body-checking people in the left? Well, I’ve read every Thunderbolts issue, and he is does not and is not. I always got the sense that he’d stab himself in the hips with that thing.

Anyway, this helmet’s kind of busy, but is symmetrical; why, sometimes it has two antennae (but normally not). The chest is armored, with a big Iron Man exhaust thing in the front. Zircher would always draw MACH-III basically leaking red light, from the chest, the helmet, and the wings. The wings are back to conventional aircraft things, but have these turbine-esque circles at their base. I really liked that when I was reading Thunderbolts, if only because I thought a toy would build a joint in there. A customizer thinks primarily in plastic.

The armor has these weird shoulderpads that look like squares of armor that drape down. They tend to change shape a lot, so I wasn’t’ sure how to interpret them. The legs have jets, but they’re now in the back of the calf, rather than the side. And the legs are armored now, instead of spandexed.

It was this leg design that led me to make a MACH-III instead of the classic or recent armor. The Hasbro Ultimate Iron Man had calf jets just like MACH-III, and the rest looked pretty good, so I wedded Ultimate Iron Man legs with a Deathlok torso (with double cybernetic arms). I sculpted an armored chest over Deathlok’s musculature, using a rubber band along the bottom as a guide. Look, it’s symmetrical! Mostly symmetrical, it kind of bunched up on the left, but the point is he’s not a Nike Swoosh. The Deathlok arms end in Ultimate Iron Man hands, chosen for their weapons modules. I could easily have glued on something like this to Deathlok’s hands, but this seemed more stable. I might still replace the barrels, though, they look like machine guns. The head is a Plan B SWAT helmet, complete with goggles, using a Japanese figure’s rebreather (heavily modified), some sculpting, and an Exosquad antennae underneath a Zoids plug. The shoulderpads also come from Zoids, they were leg armor to a, and I’ll mess this up, Cannon Spider? They’re not very accurate, but look great and mirror the helmet design.

The backpack is a MegaBloks Bionicle knock-off robot hip, to give ball joints to the Sigma Six wings. I need to add something to the back of that pack, because it currently looks too plain and lego-y. I added the rocket from the back of the ML11 Ultron glider… it’s not in the art, but the Megabloks piece seemed to end too far up on the back. The wings terminate in gatling guns, which is a Sigma Six Duke design element, not a MACH-III element. This is staying, though, due to awesomeness. Obviously the wings were chosen for their turbines, as otherwise they’re not a great fit to the art. If I was feeling more faithful I’d cut an Air Strike Wolverine wing pack in half.




MACH-IV is a great Todd Grummet design (I think… probably… I don’t know! Marvel, please publish Thunderbolts hardcovers, for the benefit of myself and like, five other guys). The armor now has full banded “Comic Bionics” arms, terminating in five-finger gloves. The wings are pretty conventional too, and the helmet has no rebreather, just a “Y” of red glass. The armor goes to spandex below the waist, save some jet boots. It’s a nice simple design., the closest thing Abe’s ever had to “elegant.”

The definitive MACH-IV custom was done by Church of Zod on the Fwooshnet, here. His upper torso is dead on: a great sculpt and great use of fodder. The legs, from a Ruby Armor Cyclops, are off model, but are all black anyway, so it doesn’t matter. He went for techno-detail over artistic matching, and in my opinion made the right choice. When I get around to MACH-IV, I’ll be emulating this custom heavily.

And that’s the most anyone’s ever written about Abe Jenkins. He’s also got three major Beetle armors, one of which Toy Biz made and it’s awesome. Oh, and Ultimate Beetle, which is very MACH-esque. It’s even got Bagley Bubbles!

I plan to have MACH-III painted by mid-next week, and that’s another post derived from this material...

Project: MACH

I’m trying to do a blog instead of a Web page because I have thoughts on a daily frequency. But I’ve also been able to do work on a daily frequency lately. Regular work increments means regular Work In Progress opportunities. So today is my first WIP, my Marvel Legends MACH-III.

It’s really great to be this far into a custom figure for the MACH-X character. First, he’s a Thunderbolt, that area of the Marvel Universe that lays untouched by professional toymakers. Second, he’s an incredible character that would be hard to make work in another book. Compared to most people, he’s smart, capable, noble, and heroic. But he's not really fit for the circles he travels in, and so fundamentally is kind of a loser. But he’s definitely the most toyetic of the Thunderbolts, as he’s a guy wearing a technological suit with all this crap on it. Well, based on that definition, Techno is the most toyetic of the Thunderbolts, but the MACH armors are a more unified design.

Anyway, I’ve wanted to make a MACH-I, II, III, or IV for years. Since I haven’t been very productive until late, that desire has manifested in the rodent-like hording of pieces, scraps, and bits that might go on a MACH armor. I’ve got a huge accessories box, and I bet a quarter of the pieces were saved because “Oh, that kind of looks like MACH-II’s helmet,” or something. So starting work on this meant going through my stores and selecting some pieces, at least to start. And finishing will be really cathartic!

But here’s the think about MACH-X’s design: it’s not as technological-bit-boxy as it seems. Thunderbolts is a new team concept compared to the Defenders or the Champions, but it’s always been defined by a classic aesthetic. Even when Kurt Busiek looks forward, he’s looking back… and though Busiek hasn’t written the team for a while, he’s still a defining influence. So the MACH armors have all these techno-bits, especially the helmet and the wings, but they’re still a comic-book spandex frame wearing that armor, similar to the classic Iron Man look. So when I would sit down with an armored base figure, say, the Metal Gear Solid Santa in-Power Armor that came out a few years ago from McFarlane, I’d see all these great details, but be forced to admit that Daredevil was a better base.

What are the design elements of the various MACH armors? I want to go through this exercise to map out future customs (a MACH corps would rule, consistently and thoroughly), but also because I think about customs at work, away from my comics library, and I can confidently state there is a famine of MACH-X reference art on the Internet. So based on the 100+ issues of Thunderbolts, here are some definitive reference shots of Abe’s armors.


MACH-1 has some great clunkiness to it, but in some parts is just standard super-hero union suit. This is a choice by Bagley and Busiek to design something outside of the Iron Man paradigm. Abe refers to his MACH-III and –IV suits as “armor,” but MACH-I wore a “flight harness.” So the technology can be boiled down to a helmet, a backpack with wings, and some gauntlets for weapons. The helmet evokes a jet pilot but has this cool asymmetry to it. There are four wings, and these armored gloves, with smooth weapons modules but big clunky elbow armor. The hands have the middle and ring finger fused, although the hands have to be splayed for it to very visible. The legs have these Bagley Bubbles on them, I don’t know what they do, but are basically spandex until the boots, which have jets on the outside calves (kind of a unique design element). The chest is this armored vest, with a nice logo display. The original Thunderbolts looked so unified! Then he’s got these Mk6 Space Marine shoulder pads with more bubbles.


Check out those weapons pods... three barrels each, one vertical to the wrist, one horizontal. That's a cool Bagely design element. I really like how rugged the MACH-1 design looks. Also, excellent Karla picture. Why, I ask myself, is Moonstone so low on my list of customs?


I’ve got a WIP for MACH-1… it’s about a year old, and I don’t know when I’ll finish it. I’ll be using a Black Widow belt for the leg bubbles, and I added some boot stuff of my own because it looked cool. I guess this mainly needs wings, but the shoulder pads have also given me pause. Nothing ruins posability like shoulderpads! The base is a Daredevil with Bullseye legs. I think that’s a Daredevil head underneath. The techno bits came from a McFarlane Manga Freak and Manga The Green Guy that was kind-of Evangelion-esque. There’s no room in my brain left for McFarlane toy names. Sometimes I can’t remember the name of a Transformer and I feel a twinge of guilt; not so with McFarlane output.

This WIP was pretty rough, and I don't think I'd show it if I weren't already knee-deep in a MACH-1 article. It looks like I slapped some Milliput on the head when it was only halfway pliable. Also, the weapons modules look like crap, I think I just put some Lego pieces on the end as barrels. So let's underline the In Progress bit and move on.

Man, looking through these old TBolts issues really makes a fellow want to make more TBolts. Also, Bagley's a great storyteller. Every panel moves the action along, and he never stops to wow you... The reference art for MACH-1 is a tad lacking because Bageley never stops and gives you "jack shots." (I think that's an Erik Larsen term.)

Uh... that is to say, Bags almost never does a jack shot.

MACH-II is also designed by Mark Bagley, so it’s a streamlined update of the original. It takes the vest from M1 and continues the armor lines down to the boots. The helmet is more symmetrical, except for the single antennae. The shoulderpads shrink, and the weapon modules look smaller. Check out those wings! They’re this weird crescent shape, like the wings from McFarlane Manga… uh, the girl. Angela? Tiffany? Anyway, I have them.

Whoops! I never got around to MACH-III, and therefore I've got no WIPs of my recent work to show! Expect that on Monday.

More on Toy Fair

Yesterday I was talking about Toy Fair, and how the potential, with any particular Toy Fair, San Diego Comic Convention, or this year and hopefully never again, New York Comic Con, exists for companies to come out with a professional figure that wrecks the plans of a customizer. There might suddenly be a factory-made version of the character you did, or perhaps the perfect base might be released.

I’ve been customizing for a while, and the one thing I’ve learned is that the Perfect Base is always bested as our hobby develops, as articulation and sculpt evolve. I horded ToyBiz Wrestlers riding motorcycles because they were 6 inches tall, had ball-jointed hips, and were clearanced at $3… it was an amazing convergence! But only amazing for 2001, it turned out, because a year later Marvel Legends hit. All that said, I don’t see anything at Toy Fair that makes my bases obsolete. Wasp, Psylocke, Captain Marvel, and Luke Cage were released in 2006, and make a great set of utility bases.

Which leads to an interesting situation. 2007 is a continuation of well-established trends, as super-articulated lines continue or blossom (like Mattel’s DCSH and the Indie line), so the pool of compatible bases grows and grows. I’ve recently started customizing again, and I’ve found I’m more productive than I ever was in past attempts. A large part of this is because I have such a full selection of bases to choose from, all in the right scale and style.

For instance, I just finished a late-nineties Phoenix, from a ML15 Spider-Woman base. The work went really fast, because Spider-Woman has nearly all the right colors for the custom, and the costume only has one engineering bit.


Phoenix, the, uh, 6 month gap costume? I'll show this in greater detail once it's finalized, but it came together at a dizzying pace that kind of surprised me.

To contrast, my last major customizing burst happened in 2003 something? Electra, the first Marvel Legends female, had just been released as the shortpack in her assortment. At the same time, Doubledealer did this Frank Quietly Emma Frost from a Spider-Man figure. A plastic sex change! Think of the possibilities! I went out and got a bunch of, uh some kind of Spider-Man, he had light-up eyes, and a really femmy build. I cut off the torso just above the ab crunch (difficult proposition) and grafted on a female upper torso and shoulders… I used a few ToyBiz Bride of Venom figures that had been clearanced once. Rejoin the arms, add a ball-joint head, and I had a passable female. But all that work to get to a vanilla body! I get the same results today by ripping off Psylocke’s sash.

Anyway, the trend in figures seems to be sliding back from 6 inches to 5 inches. Maybe the three lines of 6-inch articulated superheroes will stay, and maybe Hasbro is looking for an excuse to kill it. But right now is an incredible time to customize. I'm used to having to grind off all this detail, and swap parts all over the place. Now that I'm working again, I’m really amazed at the speed at which my ideas take form!

Dodging the Toy Fair Bullet

It’s the final day of Toy Fair 2007, although for we non-attendees, the news dried up on February 11 (Day One) and started on February 9 (Day -1). I don’t get you, Toy Fair, but you don’t get yourself, do you? You’re a show for industry, where stores decide what product from a manufacturer they’re going to carry on their shelves. But you’re so overwhelmed with press that companies can’t display anything that doesn’t get carried without some egg on their faces. So the actual buyer/manufacturer congress takes place at Pre-Toy Fair, and things are finalized by February so the Internet can give us a good picture of what we’re getting on Toy Fair weekend.

But this evolution isn’t complete… Toy Fair isn’t open to the public, and in name, at least, it’s still for industry only. So companies like Hasbro can withhold product and still fit the premise of the event. Why didn’t we see Marvel Legends? Hasbro says they’ll be at a comics convention on the 24th of February, which is a pretty great way to reach fans. But it’s still delayed… and doesn’t really leave anything for Toy Fair to do. I think I’ll see the 2007 Marvel Legends lineup in the month of February, so slight harm, no foul.

Anyway, a traditional, no-omission, Toy Fair is an important event for the customizer. A project could be scrapped if the character will be done professionally. Worse, one’s labor might be proven obsolete if a company puts out the perfect base. At the end of the year I usually evaluate my projects with a mind towards the likelihood of Hasbro/Mattel/Marvel Toys putting the character out.

But that’s less of a concern for the Marvel Legends customizer than it used to be. Toy Biz made a huge chunk of the Marvel Universe in plastic, and customizers either tend to improve on professional work (lessening the relevance of a new figure) or involve themselves with obscure characters that will never be made. Prove me wrong, Hasbro, make some Thunderbolts!

So I had no projects affected by Toy Fair. The only thing I was worried about was the First Appearance Storm that some people reported seeing at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con. But Storm wasn’t on any of the leaked lists I’ve seen so far. And anyway, I just completed a Storm in her Avengers Adventures costume (pretty iconic, I think), so there probably won’t be overlap regardless. The Legendary Comic Heroes line, aka the Indie Comics line by Marvel Toys, is about the only thing of interest for the 6-inch customizer. These all seem like great figures, but very few of them fall into to traditional “human physique covered in spandex” model that Marvel and DC characters define. Why buy a Witchblade and carve her down to a basic female, when she looks like a Psylocke with Witch-junk added? Conan would be a decent start at a Namor, but Hasbro is supposed to be doing a Namor For Real this year in Marvel Legends.


My Avengers Adventures Storm, a work in progress. You had the perfect chance to screw me, Hasbro. Toy Biz would have done it.