X-Men Month Finale: Group Shots

X-Men month concludes with some group shots of the custom X-figures I've done. If you get through a whole theme month, you deserve a post that's the rough equivalent of a clip show.


In my geek fan-and-not-reality-based "If I Ran the X-Men" scenario, this would be my X-Men team. Cyclops, Jean, Beast, Rogue, Nightcrawler, Kitty, and Bishop. I see it working in a Marvel Adventures continuity, where Wolverine and Storm are taken by the Avengers. Also, it's got a nice X-Men Evolution feel to it.

Actually, that's a costume I wanted to do for Cylops this month, is an Evolution look (but not Evolution style). But he's got these X-badges on his shoulders, and I didn't know how to make those work on ToyBiz-style arms. Hasbro arms are a different story, though. And I should be getting an Ultimate Wolverine soon!


Cyclops and Jean Grey are the last two holdouts from the Jim Lee era of costumes. Wait, I forgot that Cyclops was done... but I never liked the X-Men classics version.


My current Uncanny team, waiting to drop Marvel Girl in when Hasbro Series 3 comes out this summer. I really wanted to fit Warpath into this month, and then I'd need a Darwin, and Sway and Petra while I'm at it...


All the X-Men customs I've done! From left to right: X-Factor Jean, X-Factor Cyclops, Adventures Storm, X-Factor Beast, Emma Frost, Jim Lee Jean, Modern Polaris, Alan Davis Bishop, Modern Havok, Modern Nightcrawler (basically blocked), Jim Lee Cyclops, Astonishing Kitty Pryde, Astonishing Beast, Mimic, 6-Month Gap Rogue, and 6-Month Gap Phoenix.

So, naturally, one follows an X-Men month with an Avengers month. I'm going to Las Vegas in early April, but I think I can manage a decent set of posts. I'll do it for Cap. See you Monday!

Final WIP: X-Factor Beast

X-Men Month continues with Beast in his X-Factor uniform, from the six or so issues when he was both furry and still wearing his brown and yellow suit.

I look at the picture from my WIP post, and the proportions look fine. But they didn’t work on the toy in person… The Blanka legs seemed too long. It was probably those weird knees: SOTA makes the world’s longest knees. Make a note: a Street Fighter figure is a good starting place for a Manos-the-Hands-of-Fate Torgo figure. Anyway, the knees didn’t allow him to crouch properly, so I cut off the legs off another Marvel Legends 4 Beast (happy to use him! This series was $2.50 at KayBee for a while, so I’ve got a few) and grafted them onto the Blanka legs at the mid thigh. I then sanded the fur details off and sculpted uniform cuffs on the legs. Then he was ready for painting.

I tried to return to spray painting for some applications with this Beast custom. This past weekend I went to the Home Depot and got looked for the colors I’d need; notably, white and brown. Last year I had this idea that spraying base coats was going to streamline my whole operation and let me pump out customs left and right. I invested in all the Krylon Fusion colors (bonds to plastic! Although it’s not too different from normal spraypaint) I could find. But I was missing white (I didn’t think I’d need to do base coats with Fusion, but it in fact is not a magic miracle paint that blocks out dark area on plastic) and brown. First, Home Depot has some kind of exclusive with Rustoleum, so I had to settle for their Fusion knockoff. I then covered Beast’s head, hands, and feet in masking tape, and sprayed him base white and supposed brown. But Brown my ass… Beast came out looking reddish purple, and certainly about 50 Rs more that the cap of the spraypaint.

But some quick brushwork changed his tone to the brown I wanted. The stripes went on pretty easy, as this is the third X-Factor pattern I’ve done by now.

Final WIP: Modern Havok

X-Men Month continues with Havok in his modern costume from Uncanny X-Men.

Ever since Havok was reintroduced into the Marvel Universe by Chuck Austen, his costumes have been cool and getting cooler. I loved the armored arms thing, liked it better when it went down to tech gloves, and I think the streamlining for the Billy Tan Uncanny X-Men book is a great nouveau-classic look. It’s just technical enough to be a containment suit, but also looks like what superheroes wear.

This custom was done in a few hours tops. The base was Havok, and the head was Angel. These are both minimal effort choices, and I’ve seen other heads like Legolas and Gambit that admittedly look better. But when I compared the effort needed to use one of these alternatives, I shrugged by shoulders and popped off Angel’s head. It’s not a bad choice… one thing I don’t like about the Toy Biz Havok is how angry that face is. It perfectly fits the Outback-era Havok, and highlights how much calmer the character is now.

The boots are Bullseye boots painted silver. They’re drawn like a flexible material instead of armor, so he must wear moonboots or something… they’re probably furry on the inside. I wanted to get some fabric sculpt/texture in there to add some detail. Also, I surrounded the white circles and lines with an underlayer of metallic blue. I’ve seen it done more effectively, but this is good enough for me.

Final WIP: Jim Lee Cyclops

X-Men month continues with a Jim Lee-era Cyclops.

The Jim Lee era of the X-Men books is a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, these are some of the worst costumes ever. Each one is a textbook of everything that’s wrong with 90s comics visuals… all the straps and pouches and exaggerated anatomy and lack of bilateral symmetry. But on the other hand, I didn’t know the X-Men from Adam before the cartoon that had these costumes… in many cases, these are the character’s archetypical looks. Toy Biz knew this, and has put out nearly the entire Gold and Blue teams, while other eras (John Byrne, Frank Quietly, etc…) have only one or two entries. So I was only two figures away from finishing the team, and needed a Jim Lee Jean Grey and a better Jim Lee Cyclops.

The base is Black Panther, which is a textured black that drybrushed easily up to a dark blue. The hands and knees come from the X-Men Classics Cyclops, which was too puny to represent the character, especially compared to the other Jim Lee-era figures Toy Biz has put out. The hands are doing Cyclops things (pointing and grasping a visor), and the knees have his 90s leg straps. Leg straps were a plague on comics through the 90s; and the only nice thing I can say about Cyclops is that he has two matching straps. I’m looking at you, Superboy.

The feet come from Series 10 Cyclops. Most importantly, the ankle joints are yellow, but I also like the slightly disproportionate size. He’s like a Jim Lawson illustration. The head is an XMC Cyclops mounted on the Black Panther neck, so that Cyclops can finally look up and down. Cyclops toys are cursed with locked-down heads so they can use a light-up feature, but the first thing I want them to do is angle up and shoot off a Sentinel head!

The straps are straight from the winged backpack that came with Air Attack Wolverine. They look a bit awkward in the back, but have the detail, color, and flexibility I was looking for.

I want to finish off X-Men month with group shots, so check back Friday for the whole Jim Lee team.

WIP: X-Factor Beast

X-Men month continues with a WIP of X-Factor Beast.

I love the multi-color X-Factor costumes, and I love Beast as a gorilla. So I want to do a custom of Beast in his X-Factor brown, but with fur (because dumb, pitiful Beast was a dragging, boring, trifling storyline that could not end, and I only read early X-Factor in reprints, mind you). I think he was in this state for something like 6 issues, but it’s a good look.

The idea was to put paws and a Beast head on Street Fighter Blanka. Looking over the two figures, though, I wanted the increased breadth of the ML4 Beast shoulders. Also, I remembered how the Beast torso came from the old Spider-Man Classics Useless Transforming Venom… so it would work for a furless custom. Also, I’ve had some experience with painting Street Fighter shoulder balls… it’s tough! That soft plastic is tightly put together, and it’s hard to sand in a controlled manner to get down and allow clearance for paint. So I cut into both Beast and Blanka at the pectoral muscles, and switched the two.

I wanted to keep the ankle swivel, as it works really well for croutching poses. I switched the Blanka feet with Beast feet, and cut room for the joint pegs to make the join… But these proportions aren’t working for me. It’s no longer simian, is it? Not to mention 8 feet tall.

The Beast sculpt, even the pieces built specifically for it, are a bit light on the fur sculpt. So maybe I’ll end up adding full Beast legs at the mid-thigh to fix the proportions. I dunno… but I will say I still like this face sculpt. It doesn’t work as an Avengers Beast, but as a 90s crazy Cookie Monster Beast, it’s spot on and so full of personality!

Final WIP: Modern Polaris

Here’s Polaris in her modern costume, as seen in Uncanny X-Men. I already talked about the construction, but the paint and the cape deserve some mention.

I painted all the costume in the Olive green seen on the leggings. Then the darker areas, the boots, swimsuit, gauntlets, and headdress, got an overcoat of Tamiya transparent blue. It’s a nice effect, and while I wish it was greener, the color looks green by suggestion of the stuff around it, and contrasts nicely. This costume can get too green really fast.

The cape is from a Total Justice Parallax, and looks really dramatic. But it’s a really stiff plastic and was more trouble to attach than I can go into without cursing. And I would go straight to the “C” word with this one. I had her all perfect, and then got every gluing problem imaginable, and left superglue fingerprints all over the paintjob… I’m stopping, but every flaw detectable by the viewer’s eyes, I blame on the cape.

I thought this was coming together nicely, but now I’m just washing my hands of it. It’s done, end of story. Oh, and that's a modern Havok in the picture. I'll give him a post next week.

Final WIP: X-Factor Marvel Girl

X-Men Month continues with a mostly-complete Jean Grey in her X-Factor uniform. I’ve had two days of WIPs, so what else is there to say? One might notice that the upper torso looks a bit different. I did some comparison to my Phoenix custom, with the torso ball joint, and noticed the upper body was sitting too high. Ergo, I yanked out the female joint in the lower body and lowered it by a few millimeters.

I’m not satisfied with the linework here, but it’s yellow, and the more I try to correct it, the more it’s going to pile up and get a texture I don’t want. I painted big yellow lines, then used a red sharpie to define the borders of the X.

Also, I don’t like the hair. The main bulk of it is great, as it’s from the Phoenix figure and can’t be improved on. But I tried to cover a gap on the right side with other hair, from the original Sniper Wolf head and from some Psylocke stuff I had sitting around. But it’s too obviously separate pieces, and I need to do something to link them together. Maybe I’ll add some Green Stuff if I’m ever working with it on other figures.

WIP: Modern Polaris

X-Men Month continues with a WIP of Polaris in her costume from the Brubaker/Tan run of Uncanny X-Men, currently ongoing.

I think Psylocke is just about the perfect female ML. The posability is great, the sculpt is good, and the whole thing is carried off without much in the way of sculpted detail. Toy Biz never reused this mold, and Hasbro doesn’t seem to have plans to, but it’s a great vanilla figure from head to toe. So I popped it into my Polaris project, based on seeing other customs doing pretty much the same thing, and noticing the nice match between the Psylocke face and Billy Tan’s art.

There’s some sculpted detail here, but it’s all pretty simple. I did a boot design, some gauntlets, and her costume straps. Polaris has a bodice thing, unlike Psylocke, so I cut the area out of an Emma Frost, dremeled it thin, and glued it on (using modeling compound to make the join). I could have sculpted the whole bit, but I just didn’t feel like it. By the by, I want to say a bit on the subject of sculpting bosoms. Back on the old RTM Customize list, nobody wanted to be the first person to do it and get labeled as an Toy Pervert. I remember Bill Burns did an excellent Kingdom Come Powergirl, and his write-up was something along the lines of, “I added, on the chest, you know, because the character, she’s… tee hee!” And the rest of us sat back and drank to his bravery. But that time of innocence has past, and now forums like the Fwooshnet are full of Bagley Black Cats, more clay than plastic, they are! I’m going to dance deftly into Toy Pervert/Erik Larsen territory, and declare it positive progress. Aren’t we trying to replicate our source art?

Anyway, I didn’t want to sculpt a woman’s chest, that’s kind of weird; so I sawed off a bodice and glued it on.

Polaris seems to have a Hair Pile going on… it’s not a beehive or a beauffant, which would be really cool if it was still possible to see hair like that and think Night Girl and not Marge Simpson. Is there an Imperial Guard analogue for Night Girl? Right now the figure is unsanded and unpainted, except that I popped off the legs, threw on some green, then popped them back on for the WIP shot. They might have to come off again to paint behind the hip balls. I love being able to disassemble the figure to paint the crevices.

WIP: X-Factor Marvel Girl

X-Men Month continues with a WIP of Jean Grey/Marvel Girl in her red X-Factor uniform.

I talked a lot about this project yesterday, but kept the figure in a pristine shape. It was basically Spider-Woman, save for the removed web wings. Now I’ve taken the figure up to the construction stage, with the head and hair in place, and all the necessary sculpting done.

The face is from Metal Gear Sniper Wolf, mounted on the front of the Spider-Woman head. This is my third Jean Grey custom, all using this face. I use the cast system, just like Astro Boy! Actually, I shouldn’t make light of this, as I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time assigning faces to characters, making sure I had sufficient faces to do all the variants of a character I wanted, and then something happens, like this new Hasbro Jean Grey comes out with a face that will work better… I’d say it was wasted time, but I was at work.

The hair is from Phoenix; actual rubber hair instead of cast hair like I used for the 6-Month Gap Phoenix custom. I had the hair lying around after using the body for Rogue. X-Factor Jean had the biggest hair imaginable, what with being in the mid 80s and all, so I needed to use this piece. The Phoenix hair has a gap on the right side where the original’s ear is visible, but I didn’t have an ear to spare, so I covered the space with Sniper Wolf hair.

The only other sculpting was bootcuffs. Now to paint her up. One might notice that all the yellow has been sanded off, even some of the stuff that would have fallen under the X. I wanted a clean chromatic slate one I started painting, and never wanted to have to cover yellow with red (it doesn’t work too well).

Building a Ball Torso Joint

X-Men week continues with a method I developed for fixing Spider-Woman from Marvel Legends series 15, who is a perfect base for X-Men customs! X-women customs, more specifically.

Marvel Legends series 15 contained a new female figure, which was used as Wasp and Spider-Woman with minor variations. Taking the limbs out of the equation, the body is pretty great. The hips are ball joints that drop below the torso, allowing a good range of motion while looking pretty decent and not obscuring the Hinder Sculpt (HS). The torso is designed to allow the upper torso to slide back and forth over the lower torso, mimicking the conventional ab crunch with different mechanisms. The thing is, this torso mechanism doesn’t work. The parts are too tight, or have too short a range of motion, to achieve much of any effect. Instead you get a cut in the torso that doesn’t allow anything. Wasp can move by a few millimeters, but Spider-Woman is stuck.

I’ve seen examples of a fix for this on the Fwooshnet, and I’ll try to get a link to the article. These descriptions are a tad sparse, but I tried to carve out more room for the upper torso to slide back and forth. It led to a wobble, an uncontrolled joint, instead of an improved torso joint. So maybe I’m not really understanding what was done here. Please write in to the blog if you have any insight! Unable to get the existing joint to work, I tried to re-engineer the joint altogether.

Since I had no slide, I tried to replace it with a ball joint. First, I split my Spider-Woman in two, by giving it a good yank. Next I carved a place for my Kinex socket joint in the lower torso. I took out the back (back aesthetics are secondary to front aesthetics) and mounted the socket as close as I could to the front wall of the torso, and just below the top of the piece. I mentioned before how these Kinex pieces don’t respond well to super glue, but with some activator, this one held. If it hadn’t, I would have used some epoxy.

Next, I split the upper torso and removed the arms. I tried to save the original mounting of the torso coupling, as it had a metal piece at the core of the plastic, and would have been a perfect mount for the ball joint. No dice, though, the thing had come loose during the operation. Instead, I took a Kinex ball, dremeled off the extraneous plastic while leaving plenty of mass to mount it with, and secured it to the upper back piece with plumber’s epoxy. I played around with the mounting to make sure that upper torso was properly spaced from the lower torso. If the fit was too snug, then there wouldn’t be any slide at all, as the ball-and-socket doesn’t totally replicate the original slide mechanism.


Once the epoxy dried, I put Spider-Woman back together. Here’s some pictures of the assembled piece, showing the range of motion achieved at the mid-torso mark. Note that the dimensions of the figure have changed. The further apart the torsos are, the wider the range of motion; you want to find a good balance of range and aesthetics. Aesthetics is taken to mean proportions, not Giant Torso Gap as this picture shows.



To fix for this gap, I built a joint shield out of modeling compound. I used Green Stuff, which is basically a trade name, at least in Britain, because it’s flexible and wouldn’t shatter. But I made it thin enough that it’s never shown any signs of being under pressure. Maybe it wouldn’t work as well if the figure did more crouching and less back-arching. I’ve been using it on flying characters, who arch their back but don’t crouch forward… still, this could be remedied by mounting the socket at a forward angle.

I first tried out this fix making the 6-Month Gap Phoenix I showed a few weeks ago. I was happy with the result, but finding the right mounting for the parts was a pain. This time things went together without hassle. Tomorrow, I’ll take this body to a custom-specific WIP, as I make Jean Grey/Marvel Girl in her red X-Factor uniform.

Final WIP: X-Factor Cyclops

X-Men Month continues with my basically finalized X-Factor Cyclops, ready to be fielded with… Archangel? I guess I don’t have any teammates for him yet.

The Comic Pants site recently did a podcast on character design, and had a few words to say on the subject of Cyclops’ costumes. This one was recognized as inferior to the original, as the blue and white had such a strong invocation of toothpaste. I can’t really argue, but I still like it. Toothpaste can be heroic! Without it, we’d be overrun by cavity creeps. Also, I like the big X design, and this coloration lasted much longer then the yellow X Cyclops started with. This costume was in place when I first became aware of the X-Men, when Cyclops was being inserted into X-Men video games and cartoons even though he was on X-Factor in the comics.


The Black Panther body takes paint pretty well. Paint rub still happens, of course, but it looks like shading instead of a nick. Oh, and check out the grey background! The new rule is that X-Men get shots on grey, so they don't get lost in the blue.

Review: DC Direct Superman/Batman Public Enemies 2

Interrupting X-Men month, and customizing talk in general, I wanted to say a few words about the DC Direct figures I got recently.

I mail-order all my DC Direct figures… almost all of my figures, really. I live in Arlington, Virginia, in an area that’s too urban (too urbane?) to be near a Wal-Mart. All the other stores are close, except our Kay Bee which just closed, but I can’t look for toys anymore without worrying about losing my parking space and spending $20 in gas. So everything comes in the mail, and I get DC Direct figures about two weeks after their release at comic stores. I order from Corner Store Comics, which has great prices but is a little slow on the draw. Also, they refuse to accept that I’ve moved, and continue to ship to my old address. I guess that’s a testament to how much I like their prices, selection, and service; I continue to order from them even though they can’t send stuff to the place where I live.

Okay, so I tracked down my DC Direct shipment this past weekend. I really dig this Ed McGuiness Luthor… it’s got great posability for being so faithful to a design that’s hostile to conventional articulation. The Natasha Irons Steel is great, with ball hips, a ball torso, swivels below the knees… it’s just a few joints away from being up to DCSH standards. Nightwing and Future Superman are okay, but should have ball-joint heads like the McGuiness JLA figures! And then there’s Hawkman.


Everyone hates DC Direct for their inability to use a ruler and find a consistent scale. They made Hawkman really bulky, and about a half-inch too tall, but the combination is a serious disruption of scale. He’s way too big when compared to the comic that inspired this wave. I can echo the sentiment repeated over the Internet these past few weeks, that it’s a beautiful figure, but doesn’t really belong next to other McGuiness figures.

However, I can’t stay mad at this figure. Why? DC Super Powers Hawkman, that’s why. That figure was huge, a head over his compatriots and much bulkier. It was my first vision of Hawkman; he rarely appeared on the Super Friends cartoon, so the plastic was the defining standard. Now I’ve read Hawkman comics, and know he’s not always portrayed a winged giant. But I accept this interpretation as perfectly valid, especially in plastic.

So this DC Direct Hawkman is probably a scale mistake, something DC Direct says it will totally get serious about correcting every year for the past five years. But I dig it regardless.

WIP: Emma Frost

X-Men Month continues with a pretty-much finalized WIP of Astonishing X-Men Emma Frost, with a new head.

I really like the Hasbro Emma Frost figure; I think the leg and torso posability is wonderful, on par with Psylocke. But the head is tiny, and might fit on a Star Wars figure. The new head comes from a MAC Fathom. Good for me for finding a use for this thing, as I’m pretty sure I bought it in the past two years for $2 from some Web site’s clearance section. The recipe is directly stolen from Norm, although there are quite a few Emma head-swaps out there.

There are two difficult points to this swap. First, the hair is meant to frame the narrow original face. I sawed of both faces (not the heads) and fit the original hair over the resulting shape. It wasn’t a great fit, but I extended the forehead with milliput to make it work. Next there was a problem with skin tone: Fathom has a deep tan, and Emma is computer programmer pale. I covered all the skin with Games Workshop Elf Flesh, which is normally way too pale for a figure, but was a shade darker than the original body. I repainted the eyes and lips because I was a bit sloppy with my Elf Flesh, which has a joke in it somewhere. Something something D&D something… I did the lipstick in electric blue, with an overcoat of pearl to soften it.

WIP: X-Factor Cyclops

X-Men month continues with an initial WIP of X-Factor Cyclops.

The base is Black Panther with ML10 Cyclops boots, gloves, and head. I first ran sand paper over Black Panther for half an hour, taking down the extremes of the texture. Cyclops boots and head gave the figure more height; probably more than the OHOTMU would dictate, but I want my Cyclops to have presence, and to be taller than the Jean Grey figures I have. I wanted to keep the Black Panther hands (and had already trimmed off the claws), but the figure was getting Tyrannosaurus arms, so I added Cyclops hands to stretch them out. Too bad, as I would prefer Cyclops to be able to throw a punch.

I wanted to use the variant for this custom, to avoid paint rub on the ankles and wrists. But I couldn’t find it, and my customizing time is limited. Oh well!

Ball Joint Necks (and WIP: Shadowcat)

X-Men Month continues with an article on installing ball joint necks. Those X-Men, always moving their head around.

Marvel Legends has a great mechanism for neck posability that they’ve been consistent with since series 6 or so. The neck has a joint allowing the head to swing forwards and backwards, and turn on this post. But for customs using simpler necks with just a 360 degree rotation, I started installing ball joints to allow the figures to look up and down. (Or tilt their head sideways like a confused dog. Marvel Legends can’t do that, but it doesn’t come up too often.)

The ball joints themselves come from Kinex. I forget how I was first pointed towards Kinex pieces; it’s quite possible that the technique came from the old Raving Toy Maniac Customize e-mail list. Kinex sells its pieces on the Web by the piece, so one never has to get sets. I’m not aware of any other construction toy that does this, so bravo, Kinex; and too bad about coming up short compared to Lego in every other conceivable category.

Anyway, a few years ago I spent $20 and got about 100 of each of the pictured Kinex pieces. These prices reflect both the passage of time and some kind of crazy sale, but they’re still available on the cheap. I was still experimenting, but if I were to actually work through my stock and order again, I’d only get the middle set, with the two pieces of the ball joint. The other pieces just haven’t been useful. On the left is a snap-together swing joint, which I’ve tried to use for waists and bicep swivels a few times. It’s never worked, as the joint is really loose without working some superglue into the mix (and more on that later). On the right is a male-female pairing that represents the basic Kinex joint, in my understanding. It could be useful for, again, waists and biceps (the main joints that DC Direct figures are missing), but it’s such a bulky assembly that it’s hard to make happen. So again, the ball joints are very useful, and everything else, no so much.

But even the ball joints are a bit problematic, because the plastic isn’t really compatible with anything I’ve ever found in an action figure. It just doesn’t take superglue without a huge amount of surface contact. I’ve had some luck with a glue activator, but I usually either take care to completely surround the ball joint plastic with action figure plastic, or to use an epoxy putty as the binding agent. A more casual construction that would be fine for gluing action figure pieces together will just fall apart.

So, I’ve got a few customs with Kinex ball joint necks, like Monica Rambeau, Storm, Jean Grey, and some older ones that aren’t ready for this blog yet. For the purposes of my theme month, I want to use this technique to play with alternate heads for an Astonishing X-Men Shadowcat. This is a pretty good figure, although it’s more of a professional custom than a real figure. Toy Biz just recolored their Fantastic Four movie Invisible Woman, and it works! But the neck and face didn’t come out right. See, she looks kind of toadish. So I’m switching the heads.

First I boiled and popped the head off. This ended up breaking the joint assembly… I’ve had some really bad luck with this recently. With Marvel Legends female necks, heated for head removal, the back/forth neck joint is more likely to come loose than the actual head. I’ve started removing the hair, then holding the joint with pliers while I pull on the head. Anyway, next I took a Kinex ball assembly, and sawed off the assembly, leaving only the ball. I drilled a hole into the ball, so it would fit over the Shadowcat neck peg (maximizing surface area contact). On the figure, I trimmed off the head of the neck peg, spread glue activator over the stem, and fit the ball joint on it. Now I had a figure that’s ready to accept any head I’ve got.
So what’s going to go on? I had some ideas. I took some heads and dremeled them basically hollow, then put in some quick-setting plumbing epoxy. The epoxy held a trimmed down Kinex socket that I shoved in. Please note that the socket had to be really high in the head, probably in back of the eyes or nose. The Marvel Legends neck is meant to come up really high on a head, and when I stick a ball joint on top of that, it’s really easy to get a giraffe-neck. So the socket had to be really high.


My first attempt was a MAC Series 1 Willow. It’s an appropriate choice for a Whedon-written Shadowcat, but it doesn’t work for me, probably because Whedon’s Shadowcat is pissed off all the time, and certainly never smiles like this. Also the actress’s likeness isn’t obscured at all. Maybe repainting the eyes would do that, but maybe not…


Next I tried a DCSH Supergirl (I’m restricting my choices to sculpts with some element of youth in them). I think this would be a great choice for Kitty, but the scale is off. Little things, like the comparison of the head and the hands, gives this a bobble-head look. Weird, since the Superman and Batman from this series have pinheads.


Ooh, here’s a good choice! It comes from a Shadowcat figure. The whole ball-joint operation has given the figure more of a neck, and that makes a big difference.

I’m still not wild about the facial sculpt, but I’m out of ideas. Maybe something else will present itself in the future. Meh, it looks pretty good. You win this round, Toy Biz!

Tomorrow, X-Men week continues with a WIP of a figure that's already been produced professionally. It'll be Candy Stripe Tuesday here at the GF.

WIP: Nightcrawler

X-Men Month continues with Nightcrawler in his modern costume. Man, what a difficult custom!

Many customizers have done a complicated take on the modern costume Nightcrawler, taking the opportunity to correct problems with the ToyBiz release. Talents like Robokillah and Norm have slimmed down the build and especially the face, with impressive results. I used the Marvel Legends 9 Nightcrawler as a base to simplify engineering (it’s nice to have the tail secure on the torso, for one), and also because I think it’s a good match for the character’s build. This is a guy who beat up Magneto with a cudgel; he’s not a twig. (Hey, what a great opportunity to link to Nightcrawler, Mutant Loanshark, on Random Panels!) As for the face, I agree with everyone except ToyBiz that it’s not a good match for the character. It should be slimmer or more youthful or less squarejawed or something. But ML series 9 came out two years ago, and I’ve grown accustomed to it.

For this custom, I cut off the shoulder pads, sculpted new shoulders, sanded the original lines, and painted. Simple!

I really like this modern costume, which is kind of an anti-Dave Cockrum heresy. This month’s Legion of Super Heroes ran a tribute to the man’s incredible design sense, and every word of it was true. Still, the Nightcrawler design has always bugged me because it doesn’t work on an articulated action figure. The lines are broken up by the waist swivel, and my Nightcrawler figures always have their hips aligned with their shoulders so they don’t look weird. X-Men Evolution solved this with a big white belt, and it worked; the modern design goes one better and stops the red before the waist. Hooray for toyetic design! The Cockrum original, though, reigns supreme in every medium besides plastic.

WIP: Bishop

X-Men Month continues with a modified Bishop. Ooh!

When the recent Claremont/Davis book premiered two years ago, I really liked a lot of the costumes. Nightcrawler and Marvel Girl had good original looks, and Bishop looked really fresh as well. But as Internet pointed out, the costume was just his original look with a shaved head (can comics tolerate a black man sporting hair?) and rolled-down sleeves. I like this economy of design: Bishop’s costume was supposed to be a uniform, so it makes sense that he would return to it. But the sleeves and the lack of a mullet effectively de-extremed the whole thing. If this is truly Alan Davis’s work, bravo!

I popped off the arms, shaved off the rolled-up sleeves, and added some milliput to obscure the flesh texture of the ToyBiz sculpt. I painted them in my best match of the original blue, then added some blue paint to the rest of the body to match it to my arms. The head got some sculpting to fill in the skull.

When he was almost done, I noticed that the gloves wern’t symmetrical. Dammit, ToyBiz, this isn’t a Spawn toy. Why wouldn’t his gloves match? I did a half-assed fix for this, because it’s Bishop, a character that really has to struggle to be something besides “the guy with the shotguns.” He’s already out of this costume and into a new one, one with shoulderpads and big metal boots and, I think, hair. I don’t think I’ll be doing that costume, because it’s Bishop.

WIP: Astonishing Beast

X-Men month continues with Beast in his Astonishing X-Men design.

I sat down the other night and started applying paint before I realized I had forgotten to take WIP pictures. Oh well… if you want to see what the WIP looked like, check out other Astonishing Beast customs on Fwooshnet, like this one by Ryno, or this one by AlphaAttorney. I copied these customs wholesale, because they’re good looking and relatively simple.

This custom is inaccurate to John Cassady’s art in several aspects: the head is less hairy than Cassady draws, he has hands rather than paws, and there are probably some other aspects I’ve forgotten. But at the end of the day, I can’t get excited about Cat Beast. He was okay when Frank Quietly drew him, with the hulking upper body, the weird feline legs, and an ascot to top everything off. Cassady returned us to a primate body, and has Hank hanging off ceilings… when we saw the Astonishing look drawn by other artists, it wasn’t clear whether or not Beast was returning to his traditional form. Anyway, Cassady draws a hybrid of ape and cat, and Whedon continues to use the mutation as a plot element… but I’d rather have the pre-Quietly Beast.

Anyway, after voicing my disdain, I still want a blue cat lurking behind the other Astonishing crew on my shelf. After all, by fall 2007, Hasbro and ToyBiz will have released the rest of the cast. So I made an approximated Astonishing Beast. I think of it as another artist, like someone doing an Annual, doing a take on the design.

The base is, of course, the Cat-Head Stealth Beast released by ToyBiz. The upper chest, upper arms, and legs have sculpted hair. The waist, shoulders, and back sculpts use a dremel to cut hair lines into the plastic. I didn’t know if this technique would yield good results, but I really liked what I saw resulting from my scratching into plastic, and ended up doing this “negative sculpting” on the back just to save time.

Final WIP: Mimic

X-Men Month continues with Mimic, painted and mostly complete.

As I painted the blue squares running rampant on the yellow field, the “painter’s overalls” aspects of this costume snapped into place. I think that’s one of the crucial design elements, signifying Calvin’s everyman aspects. This is the Exiles version, which is always described as a mutant Captain America on a world with better mutant acceptance; but even this version spent some time in the slammer. You can tell by the van dyke. That’s how crazy the alternate universe is that Mimic comes from, that a premier hero, leader of the Avengers etcetera, can have such a brazenly counter-culture hair element.

As I mentioned when I posted Mimic’s WIP, the base from head to toe is:

• A DCD JLA Aquaman head,
• DCSH Superman torso and shoulders,
• SOTA Street Fighter Ken arms, hands, crotch, and hips, and
• Marvel Legends series 3 Wolverine legs and feet.

Additional elements include rubber bands to bulk up the boots, and goggles from a DST Spike. His X-buckle, a costume element that’s not entirely accurate, was cut off the chest of a cat-head Beast.

In Exiles, Mimic had Wolverine claws, Colossus metal, and, early on, Angel wings. I wanted a vanilla figure that didn’t need additional toy parts to be formidable. This is rethinking the character to better fit an action figure, something I do quite a bit of. Thinking in plastic puts the figure first! I imagine Mimic is copying Beast’s agility, Cyclops’ optic blasts, Marvel Girl’s telekinesis, Thunderbird’s strength, and Northstar’s flight. He’s kind of a mutant Superman, and I tried to reflect this design aesthetic throughout the figure. I did this by, uh, using Superman parts. It is an extremely subtle craftsmanship element.