WIP: Goliath

Avengers Month continues with a WIP of Goliath, from the Busiek/Perez Avengers!

I really like this Hank Pym costume, probably because it was Hank at his Awesomist of the Modern Era (before Beyond, anyway). See, he could grow, which is better than shrinking. Plus he could enlarge equipment. Making a giant sci-fi gun and then shooting someone with it is a good way to get my respect.

I took a Wal-Mart Wave Giant Man and cut off the antennae, sculpted some hair, and added some bicep mass because I had some extra milliput, and Perez always drew Goliath like he was as dedicated to the weight bench as the lab. Then I cut some strips of blister pack plastic to make his harness. He has these little bubbles all over it, and occasionally they open up and stuff comes out of them. I guess they didn’t want to make equipment pounches, as it was admittedly very 90s… so they’re bubbles. I cut the heads of about 15 Attacktix missiles, because I don’t play that game anymore. Although I might start now with my new sharpened missiles… “Whoops, missed your piece again! And sorry about your eye, but a trip to the emergency room is considered a forfeit!”

Anyway, Hank looks like he’s wearing strips of candy paper, but it will look better once the whole harness is white. I want to do most of the heavy paint lifting with spray paint, so the harness is precariously attached for this shot, and will be removed again before the spray. Hank should come together really fast after that.

Triathalon

Avengers Month continues with Triathalon of the Perez/Busiek Avengers!

I decided on doing Triathalon mainly to finish up the second lineup from this creative team. But I honestly do like the character. He’s really neat to see in a comic, because he’s got very ill-defined powers. He should have rigidly-defined powers: he’s supposed to have three times the physical capabilities as peak human levels. So you get your Guiness Book of World Records, find an entry, triple it, and that’s what Triathalon does. But in the comic, it’s hard to figure out just what three times peak human strength is. So he’s always doing some trick you wouldn’t expect, like somersaulting 50 feet into the air and punching a cement column in two or something. And your gut reaction is to call bullcrap, but then you figure, what the hell, let Busiek have his fun, it’s a new character.

I didn’t have to do any joint painting on this one, so the paints went on in maybe an hour. I did do some sculpting after the WIP, to smooth out the join between the Iron Fist body and the Falcon neck. I also added a big triangle for his central icon. But it was still a real simple custom. I would recommend it as a simple project to get started with customizing, except that, you know… not everyone wants a Triathalon.

Justice

Avengers Month continues with Justice of the Perez/Busiek Avengers!

Justice ended up more glossy than I expected, but its not a bad effect. The blue I chose was glossy (but as a dark blue it was exaclty right, so I went with it. This meant that I had to do the white sections in Pearl, but the effect was a lot cleaner than my chalky Apple Barrel white or my chunky Games Workshop Skull White.

Justice will be floating in the back of my Avengers lineups, so he’s fine as is.

Review: Hasbro Yellowjacket

Avengers month continues with a review of Hasbro's rendition of an Avengers standard: Yellowjacket!

OBQ (Out-of-the-Box Quality): 4 out of 5

Yellowjacket is a figure I didn’t expect to like as much as I do. It doesn’t do anything complex, but it’s a really well-executed generic male figure. Habro took their base body and didn’t skimp on adding extras, like the belt buckle or the shoulder-wings, to make him look good. And I love his logo. Toy Biz might have done as good a job as this, or they might have put out something with an upside-down bee or making him brown instead of black.

So good sculpt on the original parts like the head and wings. Good choice of generic parts that fit the character. Good clean paint applications, even if highlights and shading might make him look better. Yellowjacket is a four-color character, and this is a great rendition.

CP (Customizing Potential): 3 out of 5

Yellowjacket is the basic Hasbro male body, with every major joint cast in yellow plastic. I was able to come up with a huge list of uses for Quicksilver, because there are a lot of superheroes running around in blue. Not nearly as many wear yellow… but when they do, you need yellow plastic! Blue I can get from black, or green, or I might sand down to apply base coats and whatnot, but yellow is the devil color. So yeah, I’m excited about Hank’s yellow shoulders, ab crunch, hips, elbows, knees, neck… he’s a potential gold mine.

Yellowjacket gives me the following customizing ideas:

· Anti-Vision, the 90s Vision costume with the yellow arms and torso. That’s the cool Vision look, because it has his traditional colors but mixes them around so he doesn’t have a yellow cape.
· Golden-age Hourman has yellow legs. And a yellow cape.
· Mimic from Exiles, except I made him already.
· Morph from Exiles. He just got a new costume for the Claremont era, i.e. the last year of the Exiles book. Each new costume gets more and more yellow, up from just the boots in his AOA uniform.
· Golden Age Atom has yellow shoulders. And his kick-ass Mike Parobeck uniform would be cool to do! Because it features pants! On the other hand, if I want to customize a yellow short guy, I should be thinking Wolverine.
· Johnny Quick wears yellow pants. It’s a golden-age color, really.
· There are two speedsters in yellow: the Whizzer and Reverse Flash.
· Booster Gold could be made with a combination of Quicksilver and Yellowjacket. Although I might just use silver base parts for the “yellow” areas, and Tamiya Transparent them up to gold.

Huh. I thought I had more here. I swear there’s more yellow I’m scared of messing with, but I guess it’s in female costumes. Dear Hasbro: please make a Crystal, and I promise to buy one million of them.

Review: Hasbro Thor

Avengers Month continues with a review of Hasbro's rendition of Thor, in a costume he never brought to the Avengers... but he did fight Iron Man in it!

I really like Thor. It’s a great costume, probably preferable to the Walt Simonson Battle Armor Thor Something better than Simonson? Blashphemy, I know, but that armor suit looks too technical and superheroic… which is Kriby armor, I know. But I like this medieval look more.

OBQ (Out-of-the-Box Quality): 4 out of 5

I’m so giddy about that battle axe. It’s like this bell, signalling that the years of plastic hording from high oil prices are over. It’s not particularly detailed, but it’s kind of extraneous, and the figure would be just fine without it. So I’m really glad we got it. It’s like a gesture of good will cast in plastic.

Anyway, this is a great sculpt, great articulation, it’s well engineered… the ab crunch could have been screwed up royally, but it works fine. I also like the scale, which is easy to mess up on Thor. He’s not too big, like ML3 Thor was. Actually I was fine with that scale, but I admit he was too big to stand up. And Wal-Mart Thor was a bit too small, though he certainly fits some reference art.

The paint applications are careful but spartan. This figure is a careful set of paint washes away from being perfect. I’m okay with that.

CP (Customizing Potential): 2 out of 5

There’s not a lot of utility here, but it does exist. The legs, for instance, are perfect big superhero fodder… maybe useful for a Gladiator or something? Same thing with the arms. But that scalemale that covers the chest means that Thor will always be a source of parts, and not a real base. The parts don’t fit Balder, the Warriors Three, not even Odin unless I was essentially making up an Odin costume. They vaguely fit Ulik the Troll. Which is a good idea.

I’m going to lurk around and wait for someone else to come up with the perfect genius use of Thor as a custom base, especially as a base for a non-Asgardian character. But I don’t see anything right now.

WIP: Triathalon

Avengers Month continues with a WIP of a guy that was totally an Avenger once and I remember it... Triathalon! Triathalon alert! Triathalon is appearing in Avengers: The Initiative! He was in a hallway, and Justice asked him a question! I’m sure that this is the start of something big for Triathalon!

Triathalon is from the second lineup in Kurt Busiek’s Avengers. He’s a comment on Scientology, and an attempt to overhaul the 3-D Man. Which is the sort of thing that’s really important to Busiek.

Triathalon has a costume that’s toned down from the 3-D Man, but it still has a bit of that garishness. But the Marvel Legends line can abide, and provided a selection of parts that hit nearly every color zone. I took an Iron Fist and joined it with Wonder Man legs. The neck and head came from Falcon, who’s hair and mask is an exact match for Triathalon, except for the forehead device.

But here’s the thing: Falcon’s got major Pin-Head disease. It looks bad on him, and it looked horrible once the head was on the larger Iron Fist shoulders. What to do?
What I did was make two vertical cuts in the back of the head, moving forward to just behind the face. I then crammed some modeling compound in there to spread it apart. The face is still pinched, but the head is wider, and it looks better. I’m thinking about popping the head and bisecting it to spread out the face, but there’s a big chance of screwing things up. But outside of facial woes, I expect this to come together really quickly.

Wonder Man

Avengers Month continues with Wonder Man in his classic safari jacket. But there’s no rocket belt, so this is properly the new look he’s got in Mighty Avengers.

This custom went together pretty fast. I had to trim back the corners on the hair I scultped, and fuss around with red paint that didn’t adhere to anything but my fingers and tracked smudges onto the white and yellow of three other customs, but I like the way this turned out.

The head’s just okay. Guile is a big white male that looks super serious, but he’s a bit too pissed off and bulldog for Simon. I don’t know what to put in it’s place, though; maybe a DCD head, a Doctor Fate or Aquaman. The sunglasses came from Rogue, and they fit fine without turning into giant Elton John glasses. Oh, dammit, now the head looks like Elton John to me.

Review: Hasbro She-Hulk

Avengers month continues with a review of a new Avengers figure, the Hasbro Marvel Legends She-Hulk!

She-Hulk is a great figure, and a real coup for Hasbro to produce. Great sculpt, great articulation, well done all around. She was probably the most prominent missing Avenger, although I’ve had the Marvel Select one on my shelf (in the back) for a while now.

OBQ (Out-of-the-Box Quality): 4 out of 5

I would have preferred a waist joint, and something else going on with the hands. Otherwise it’s a perfect figure. The Hasbro elbows work, and the sculpt is great. This line makes you treasure good female face sculpts, and She-Hulk doesn’t look like a man or really old. How did you do it, Hasbro?

CP (Customizing Potential): 4 out of 5


Well, how often will I need an amazon woman base? Probably not frequently. But when I do, She-Hulk will be the only choice. It’s the only base built to this scale with this posability, and that makes it extremely valuable. True, the colors don’t work for much more than another She-Hulk custom. But If I’m willing to repaint, I can get a lot of utility.

She-Hulk gives me the following customizing ideas:

• She-Hulk in the Fantastic Four! No need to do the Savage look, I think.

• Titania, the second Ms. Marvel, Thundra, Valkyrie, and other tall Marvel women. Maybe not Valkyrie, she’s 6’3” in my OHOTMU, and She-Hulk is 6’7”.

• Asgardian women, like Enchantress and Sif. Yeah, Sif!

• She-Dragon… although I wouldn’t want She-Dragon to be taller than Savage Dragon. I’ll have to wait until the first Legendary Heroes wave to come out.

• Big Barda… will need a lot of work whatever base I use. But Michael Chabon thinks I should do it.

• Which begs the question: Would She-Hulk work for Wonder Woman? Here’s a height comparison:

No, probably not. But maybe a Darwin Cooke Wonder Woman… which DCD made...

• Fairchild from Gen 13. The new version even wears pants, taking out the problems with knee paint rub!

That’s plenty. I would make an F4 She-Hulk, Titania, Sif, Barda, and Fairchild. She-Hulk is officially a great base.

Review: Hasbro Quicksilver

Avengers Month continues with a review of four new Avengers that came in the mail the other day. Big Bad Toy Store shipped me Hasbro Marvel Legends 2, and I’m going to review them while it’s timely and topical. But this is a customizing blog, so I’m eschewing the Michael Crawford Standardized Toy Categories in favor of just two: Out-of-the-Box Quality (OBQ), and Customization Potential (CP).

First of all, this wave is a big step forward from Hasbro’s first Marvel Legends wave. In wave 1, Beast and Emma Frost were microcephalic missteps, Banshee had a missing piece (the collar) that created a giraffe-necked freak, and Planet Hulk had the biggest manufacturing shortcut (the arm painted silver instead of using sculpted armor) since Magneto in Toy Biz Legends series 3. This new wave has only one weird looking figure, and I think it’s due to paint applications on the face. This wave also has more Hasbro innovations, like the Gi-Joe style elbows. I don’t always like them, but they serve to identify Hasbro work instead of Toy Biz inheritance that got manufactured by Hasbro. If the baton is finally and fully passed, and the figures are this good, then I’m happy.

So, for today, Quicksilver!

OBQ: 3 out of 5

Quicksilver is the Hasbro Standard Body, which is pretty similar to what showed up on Captain Marvel, which seemed like a modification of Bullseye. This is a standard superhero body that fits a lot of characters. Hasbro could follow Mattel’s example with their Justice League Unlimited line and use this body with new heads and a host of glue-on accessories to create a host of characters. And maybe they will! The body shows up twice in this wave.


This standard sculpt is a really good choice for Quicksilver. He’s not Spider-Man skinny or Superman buff. I thinkt they have a few hands that fit the body, and chose wisely so Pietro can cut through the wind. The standard body also has boot treds, which aren’t absolutely necessary on everyone but usually don’t detract. On Quicksilver, they’re a big plus. The head sculpt is good, too: it’s Quicksilver and not a reused generic sculpt.

The paint apps are a little weird around the ab crunch, but that’s a tough area to navigate, so I give Hasbro a pass. The face would look better if it wasn’t cast in flesh plastic and was all glossy. Of course, a good wash could help this figure, but I prefer straight plastic to an overdone wash (like the kind that Toy Biz gave everything before 2004).

CP: 4 out of 5

I thought about detracting points because Quicksilver doesn’t give anything new. He’s a generic sculpt, and as such has a lot of uses, but if you’ve already got a bunch of Bullseyes, Captain Marvels, or what have you, then the only thing Quicksilver offers is color. Most of his crucial joints are cast in a dark blue, which is a similar color you could find in a lot of Spider-Man parts (but only in the legs, I guess). The more I thought about it, though, the more usage I came up with for that blue. It’s a utility color, and turns up a lot!

The face is nice, thinner than normal, and I’d like to see what other personality it takes with different hair. It could be like Dr. Strange, a face that looks both good and very different from the original as soon as you remove the mustache or otherwise modify it.

Quicksilver gives me the following customizing ideas:

• Justice showed up in Avengers: Initiative this week wearing a modification of his Avengers costume in the exact same shade of blue. Except that I already started a Justice custom.

• A lot of the X-Men have this build and wear blue suits, like 90s Cannonball and Forge.

• Some X-Men foes like Super Sabre and Riptide might be fun too. Actually, no, building Super Sabre and Arclight wouldn’t be fun unless I did their respective groups. And I hate both groups.

• Morph from Exiles has a suit with a lot of blue in it. He also has a suit with a lot of yellow in it, though..

• Quasar had a costume that was more blue than black., but I’d need a Captain Marvel for the upper body.

• Nighthawk! Perfect fit for this body! I’d give him Luke Cage boots and a Batman head, but I might actually do this custom!

• Texas Twister seems to be on a baffling upsurge. It’ll be a while before I want to do the new Texas Rangers, though.

• Union Jack, although I’d probably want to use a Black Panther and make him look extra-texture cool. Still, this Quicksilver would be a better match for his build.

• The final Citizen V, the English one, would be cool. Quicksilver’s blue would shift easily to purple.

• Blizzard would be an easy custom. All the major color groups are in place.

• Graviton sould need a girdle of white, but he’d be a good fit.

• Darkhawk? Maybe? Darkhawk is one of those blues that’s probably black.

• I have this odd love for the Blue Diamond that doesn’t extend to any other obscure Golden Age Marvel character. Well, Sun Girl. And Namora. And Blazing Skull, I like him too. But anyway, I’d make a Blue Diamond.

• Blue Beetle would be another perfect fit. Well, not perfect, the blue should be babier. But between Spider-Man and Quicksilver you could get a base with very little paint rub.

• Booster Gold could be made with a combination of Quicksilver and Yellowjacket.

• Lightning Lad from the Legion could work. The new Cosmic Boy, too.

• Commander Steel of the Detroit JLA/new JSA wears all blue. I think he’d have a heavier build, though, so DCSH Superman would be a better choice.

• Same thing with Black Lightning and Dr. Fate. Lots of blue joints, but I think they’ve got a heavier build than Quicksilver. Especially based on how Ed Benes draws Black Lightning in JLA.

• Golden Age Flash has blue legs with this build. Again, this seems like a combination of a Quicksilver lower torso and a Captain Marvel upper torso. Is there anyone with a blue shirt and red pants? Because I’m going to have three of those combinations sitting around.

There are a lot of throwaway ideas on that list, but Nighthawk, Blizzard, Graviton, Union Jack, Blue Beetle, and Golden Age Flash are all winners. That’s six! I need more Quicksilvers…

Okay, I started writing this post to review the whole wave, but this is taken more time than I thought. And I feel like I’ve given DC ideas a short shrift. So I’ll visit the three other Avengers in Hasbro Wave 2 this month, and cover the rest of the wave in May. Which I guess will be themeless.

Luke Cage

Avengers Month continues with Luke Cage in his New Avengers non-costume!

I’ve seen quite a few customs that just take Guile and repaint the skin. In the first year of New Avengers, Luke would never wear the same thing twice, so it fit. I tried the same thing: turning the Guile camo pants into jeans, turning his green a-shirt black, and repainting the skin. But first, I’ve never heard of a black a-shirt, and second, I got crazy paint rub on the shoulders. I had to sand them down drastically, and they no longer looked like musculature.

Actually in the latest New Avengers, Cage wore a black A-shirt. It's a ridiculous thing no one else can buy! It's his superhero costume!

So post-Civil War, Luke Cage is always in a black t-shirt. I went back to my custom and added a collar and sleeves, and repainted those parts black. Now the savaged shoulders can be fabric, and the whole thing looks better. I’d still prefer if Luke Cage, superhero, had a costume. But this has been the status quo for long enough for me to become enured to the whole thing.

WIP: Justice

Avengers Month continues with a WIP of Justice from the Busiek/Perez era of the Avengers! But not that monstrosity that he was wearing when he left the team. I mean, wow. Check this out from Avengers 30 something. He comes in with something that the Wasp wouldn’t dare vomit up; a low point most people didn’t think existed, mind you; and everyone has to give him lip service because he’s been the Little Avenger That Could for the past two years. And Quicksilver won’t take that crap, which is why more Avengers lineups need Quicksilver, who can be an ass whenever he wants because he’s the only guy in the publishing house with super speed.

Anyway, this custom is based off the Perez rendition of the costume, even if it was spurred by the news that Justice is returning to the look in the Avengers: Initiative book. Perez draws Vance like he’s just swimming in his cape. This is the core of the character: he’s got this huge idea for a name, like, his name is the same as Superman’s team; he’s got this big superhero costume with more pomp and circumstance wrapped up in that cape than Thor and Hercules put together, and the only reason it sort of works is that he’s so generic, in powers and background and everything. So at the core of all these superhero tropes is this little guy that can’t really back anything up that he presents. If he had about 50 more pounds of muscle and had glowing eyes, I guess, and went around lifting up skyscrapers with telekinesis, then we could talk, but in the Avengers, his point is that he’s a bit too small a fish for the pond.
Which is the point of the new costume, to tone things down so they fit a B-list hero. But it’s no excuse for this.

Have I talked about the toy yet? He’s a combination of Bullseye and Silver Surfer, to minimize paint rub and to keep him small. The cape comes from Dr. Doom, and the head and hands are from the X-Men series Angel. I sculpted the star on his chest to make it match the cape, although it’s never been raised in the illustrations I’ve seen.

Crystal

Avengers Month continues with Crystal in her modern look, as seen in Son of M, Silent War, and other stuff. She was an Avenger for years, and never wore anything like this. Well, I did see her in The Infinity War last night, on one of those Ron Lim raws Everyone pages, and her otufit was kind of similar to this. But her look from the Bob Harras Avengers years made me always think Rogue was eating a giant black-and-white cookie, so I'm not doing that.

In my WIP post, I spoke about my brilliant plan to spray the whole thing in yellow and do Crystal in like five minutes. This did not work. At all. I somehow got paint rubs!

So here’s my alternate solution. I used my light-yellow, which covers really well, and went over that with Tamiya Transparent Yellow to get the gold that Crystal seems to have. It’s a neat effect, although it looks dirtier than I’d want.

The head is Mystique. That head goes through an amazing metamorphosis when repainted, due to, I think, the big eyes that are hidden with blue skin and pupilless detail. I had to shrink the eyes a tad to avoid an anime look, and I’m not sure I’m all the way there. The hair is from a Marvel Select Spider-Woman. Inhumans have really thick hair; this is well established.

WIP: Crystal

Avengers Month continues with a WIP of Crystal.

Yeah, this totally counts! This pile of crap is a WIP, cause I’ll I plan to do is put it together and draw on some black designs. I disassembled a Mystique, then spraypainted everything in Krylon Fusion Yellow. I’ve spoken about how the Fusion Paint isn’t a magic bullet protecting against paint rub before, but this time everything will be cool.

WIP: Wonder Man

Avengers Month continues with a WIP of Wonder Man in his classic safari jacket. But there’s no rocket belt, so this is properly the new look he’s got in Mighty Avengers. Hey, Simon, where’s the rocket belt? Guy’s working for Tony Stark, on the world’s premier super team, with the largest budget, I think they can spring for a rocket belt. Instead he’s running around and jumping through Moloids. Well, that was cool.

I looked at Norm’s recipe a few months ago and had an epiphany… after seeing a bunch of puffy fabric jackets that didn’t really work for me, the use of Luke Cage was a breakthrough. The arms are great, the legs have the right mass, and he’s already got a collar! But I used sculpting compound to make more of a jackety thing in front. The boots were from the Marvel Legends Wonder Man, shortened because he got some weird proportions in the legs. The head is from Street Fighter Guile, and I’m not sold on it or the hair I sculpted. Nice do, Super-Elvis. Actually, Simon Williams is kind of a super-Elvis. Which means that the Grim Reaper is his Colonel Tom Parker.
Damn. For the first time ever I want to do a Grim Reaper custom.

The picture above was taken with my phone, so the quality ain’t there, but it’s just a WIP. There’s some red paint on because I got excited and started painting before I could take the WIP shot. I’m switching to the phone so I take more WIP shots, but it’s still an uphill battle when I’m really working.

Giant Girl

Avengers Month continues with a final WIP of Giant Girl.

This was a real simple production. I spray painted the F4 movie Invisible Woman red, then added some rubber bands painted blue. Do the face, done! Although I had some problems with the feet. I left the boots as is, with standard super-hero calf-length boots. Then I was checking the latest Marvel Adventures: Avengers book, and noticed that she had these weird tennis shoe things. You would never have known this from the book… Giant Girl is always in the back of group shots, with Cap and Wolverine running around in front of her, so the drawing of her starts at the knees. But we got some recent shots of her at human size, sitting on the couch playing video games with Spider-Man (let me pause and state what a kick-ass book this is), and I saw her shoes. I then leaffed through my collection of the first four and confirmed both of the above statements: you never see the feet, but once, in shadows, one could see the impressions of the shoes. Anyway, I had to shave down the boots and resculpt on the fly.

It’s hard to quantify why Giant Girl works so well in the Adventures book. Jeff Parker has said something like, “Well, Giant Girl would be better than Giant Man, wouldn’t it?” But we know why the Girl is better; because artist Manuel Garcia draws really cute women and Giant Girl has a lot of page real estate devoted to her. The whole Adventures line has great art, and it’s not stylized… hell, in today’s market, the lack of anime styling is a stylization itself. If kids are reading the digests, and I think they are, then Marvel is giving pre-adolescents something to look at without coming close to, you know, 90s-excess Michael Turner art.

Man, I’m really dancing around the term “wank!” And I wanted to say that the art in the Marvel Adventures books were giving kids their first erections. But I don’t think this blog is the place for that kind of talk.


I mean, check that out. Everybody loves Giant Girl.

Blue Wasp

The months between the announcement and cancellation of Blue Wasp were an emotional roller coaster for me. I was elated that they were doing this costume, and then my hopes are dashed against the rocks of, uh, whatever caused a toy company to not know that they weren’t putting out a product. Toy Biz was a real eclectic genius, you know?

Anyway, Wasp has literally one million costumes that could have been represented, but this one is the best. I first saw it in Avengers v3 #32 (research), of the Busiek/Perez run. The Wasp had been on the team something like two issues, and had been a frequent guest star before that, fighting the Doomsday Man, getting captured by Ultron, etc. Those appearances had set the tone for this character in my eyes: she was underpowered, didn’t seem to contribute much, and in the Ultron arc, was wearing the most hideous thing, that white costume with the one bare leg. So I pretty much pegged Janet Van Dyne as an Aging Skank. That’s cool; there are quite a bit of Aging Skanks in the world, so it’s nice to see them represented in comics.


But then she becomes the team leader after Thor and Cap leave because they don’t like Scientologists (I may be simplifying). And in issue 20, she answers the door in this. The costume looked great! It’s got all these standard Wasp costume elements, but they all look unconventionally great together. I hate to wax poetically about drawings of women, especially since this will be the second time in as many days I’ve been enthusiastic about Specific Fictional Creation Janet Van Dyne. But in this one issue, due to some alchemy of costume elements, the Wasp shot up in my opinion. Maybe she wasn’t so Aging and so Skank, I thought.

So anyway I painted a standard ML15 black Wasp to match the proposed colors. Her hair is Green Stuff, matching the Perez panels as much as I could.

It occurs to me that this is the leader of the Avengers I’m evaluating based on hotness, which could possibly be more feminist. Busiek wrote Wasp like he was Claremont; she was a great leader tactically and strategically; she beat Kang, and Count Nefaria, and she never ran away from meetings bravely hiding tears, or asked Captain America to listen to his heart, or somesuch tired device through which the writer says, “This is a tough woman, ahem, WOMAN.” But the leadership abilities always seem grafted on to me; like it was decided that Wasp would be a great strategist because she sure as hell wasn’t doing anything else. I like the idea that when you’re a superhero for years, you gain uber-competency pretty much by osmosis (Niecenzia explored this in a Gambit issue, with respect to Rogue, and the uber-competent Rogue in Carey’s X-Men right now is awesome, and also Nicenzia ideas go a long way with me). But these Avengers issues with Wasp as the leader always seemed like Busiek had written the script with Captain America in them, then done a find/replace to put Wasp in instead.

In summary, Wasp looks pretty. You know what other costume ruled, was the Bagely designs she wore when she would appear in Thunderbolts. He’d make some black-red-white combination that always worked. But it didn’t show skin like this blue jobby.

Quasar: Neoclassic Costume

Avengers Month continues with Quasar, in the uniform he wore at the end of his series (and in Avengers Forever, his only real significant appearance therafter).

Quasar rocks all over the place. True, he’s a naked Green Lantern theft, unless he has room to breathe in his own series and can do weird things like carry around a giant green head with three faces. But he’s awesome! I really love this costume too, as it’s got what, three colors? It’s very economical. I also liked his Annihilation costume, if only because it fixed the mullet. But that’s the costume invented to kill Wendell Vaughn in, so I soured a bit.

I was able to do this custom with a minimum of painting, due to the prodigious range of bases available to the modern customizer. The base is Captain Marvel, with Bullseye legs (for the black), Pyro boots (for the red), a Longshot head, and a collar from cut-down Pyro armor. A standard Quasar recipe calls for Nightcrawler to get the shoulderpads, but I wanted something that stuck out, not up. The Pyro armor fit the bill, and even had a musculature sculpt. But Pyro’s a much slimmer build, and I had to dramatically increase the size of the neckhole to get it to line up close to right. Still, at the end of the day, I had a custom that seemed to fall together, and the only joints to be painted over were the arms.

What else… that’s a Moon Knight cape, starred up with a silver sharpie. I need a new silver sharpie, and another black just in case. Sharpies are essential for clean line work (if you have my coffee-and-whiskey-ruined hands, that is), but they do wear out fast.

Iron Man: Modern Armor

Avengers Month continues with a repaint of Iron Man in his modern armor. Although it's not his current armor, that's the Extremis armor. Is there a better name for this look besides Modern? Is Extremis now PoMo?

This custom has been done a million times, so I’ll just link to other customs. I covered an ML8 Iron Man with silver paint, then added the Golden Avenger colors with Tamiya Transparent Yellow and Red.

But wait, there’s more! I glued on the faceplate, because nothing frustrates me more than a shelf-dive that causes Iron Man to look incomplete for six months until I can tear the room apart and find the little sliver of plastic. Since it was a permanent attachment, I cut the bottom of the faceplate down to minimize the duck face that the ToyBiz release had.

I also added Zoids pieces to the underarm to beef up the torso. The original had this weird shoulder articulation that stuck the arms a long ways away from the torso. To fit into this thing, Tony Stark would had to have had pterosaur shoudlerblades or something. So now he’d be really wide, but at least there’s some continuity in the lines of the figure. I should have just shortened the shoulder struts, an old-fashioned Grown Nerd fix, but I hate to lose posability.

Monica Rambeau from NextWave

Avengers Month continues with an Avengers in a costume she never wore while with the Avengers. Here's Monica Rambeau in her NextWave uniform.

I already showed the WIP of this (over a month ago thanks to X-Men month), but here’s the finished product of Monica Rambeau in her NextWave uniform. There are some costume details missing, like the underarm ribbing that the HATE-issue jackets have, but I’m not really fond of them.

This is a frankenstein of a Spider-Man with a Bride of Venom upper torso. The head is some video-game girl I bought in some paleohistory, with hair made by chopping up the dreadlocks from a Shadowrun figure. The arms are from Buffy, the hands and boots are from Cammy, and the jacket is from the old X-Men vs Street Fighter Gambit. So judging from the age of its parts, this custom is old enough to be out on its own.

WIP: Giant Girl

Avengers Month begins with this is WIP for Giant Girl from Marvel Adventures: Avengers. Do people call it MAA yet? They should, because I want to talk about the book all the time, and such an abbreviation will save seconds an iteration and will really add up. HAIL MAA!

I think I started this WIP about a year ago, when 12” rotocast Invisible Woman figures were clearanced. I only had some vague ideas about what to use it for… Stature had just premiered in Young Avengers, and Wasp had gotten a growing power just before Avengers: Disassembled; and then there’s Elasti-Girl, LeVIathan, and Giganta on the DC side. Giant characters just look great on a shelf, and I had this cheap base that was tantalizingly close to Marvel Legends posability. It was just missing some kind of torso joint and better hips.

So I went about improving this figure more out of a desire to do some engineering more than working towards a particular character. It’s very academic customizing; this is what one does when they have a terminal fear of finishing projects. I took the legs and glued them in place, then cut into the front of the groinacological area below the waist joint. I added in hips from an ML9 First Appearance Hulk. A Hulk figure is like a 10” or 12” figure that’s been squished down to 7 inches tall… but compare the hands, feet, hips, or breadth of shoulders to, say Galactus. They pretty much match. Before the Wal-Mart wave and Legends Icons made giant figures kind of trivial to do, I wanted to make a Hank Pym from Galactus, using Hulk parts to get around the Kirby techno-details. And it would have worked!

So after the hips were added to the torso and the legs rejoined, I finished the sculpt with plumbers putty and sanding off the lines of the uniform. There’s still some costume details to add to make her Giant Girl, like rubber bands for stripes and antennae, but I’m going to add those after I spray it red.