I don't have much for you here today. No sales pitch. No toys. Just a photo of the back of a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. There's a new trio of flavors on the market here in Columbus. (I bought one of each of them, of course.) And how do they sell it?
I have a Cheetah now, and my life's pretty complete. Back when the Justice League toyline started back in, what, 1864, a complete Injustice Gang was all I wanted. All I wanted in the world. This was back then Mattel was pretty stingy with the villains. Lex Luthor was the only one for what felt like years. Then we got an Ultra-Humanite. I was so damn happy about that Ultra-Humanite.
And it's only taken five more years to get the rest of them. Cheetah was the final straggler. Everyone else was done years ago. But that damn Cheetah! How happy I was when she was finally announced. And then months later her set never shipped anywhere. And then months later after that, it was announced that her set was being dumped into dollar discount stores. Screw you, universe!
Ultimately, as I was buying up the two six-packs I've been yammering about the past few days, I thought, fuck this, and bought her set for $20 from an online toy store on Amazon. I'm gonna complete my goddamn Injustice League.
Here's Eclipso! Well, "Eclipso." Despite the back of the box claiming this guy was totally called "Eclipso" in the episode in which he appeared, that was absolutely not the case. LIES! Eclipso is the name of the classic villain whom the toy in front is visually based on, but he wasn't named in the cartoon. Heck, this was just one body of several, including the Justice League members in the back. "Eclipso" was a prism that gave power over the body that held it to a pre-human race of snake men. They don't like that man is now the dominant species and so they're remedying that.
Sort of like Cobra-La, really.
The guy in front only gets a few seconds of screentime, but that screentime is comedy gold. The prism makes its way into the hands of General McCormick, who asks his subordinates how to get the attention of the Justice League. "Put on a gaudy costume and threaten to hurt a lot of people" was the snarky reply. So, ha ha ha, cut scene, and the general is dressed like you see here. It's hilarious, right? That's exactly why I wanted this toy, actually. Great scene.
Anyway, later on the prism gets smashed and the shards embed themselves into the skin of everyone in the Justice League except Batman (who isn't in this episode) and Flash (who's quick enough to dodge). Woo, Flash versus the rest of the Justice League! Again, pretty fun episode. But the thing that bugs me about this set is that the sixth guy in it is a normal Flash. Sure, Flash was the main character of the episode, but it means we don't get a toy of prism-mind-controlled Martian Manhunter. Boooo! [2010/03/15 11:06 pm] Shortpacked!:Peekaboo.
There is a t-shirt at the end of this post.
To the right is Guzzle! During WRECKERS AWARENESS WEEK, I discovered he could be had easily for like five bucks on eBay. Well, why not? So here he is. He's not in the best condition; he's got kinda gunky shoulders, his barrel is heavily chewed, and his gimmick doesn't work. A pristine Guzzle would, in tank mode, fire orange sparks out his ass as you pushed him along. This guy's sparking days are over. The toy's pretty simple, too, since not only was it a late G1 toy, but it also had to accommodate the sparking gimmick, which takes up the lower half of this toy's robot mode. Still, he's Guzzle and I love him.
Anyway, the "I'm Gardening Man" t-shirt! I apologize for throwing all this merch at you folks all at once in one huge, grand siege, but convention season starts for me next month, so I gotta gear up my wares. Unlike the books, which I gotta do some preorders first to be able to afford the expensive print run, the shirts are actually already paid for! I put in the order for them this morning at the local shirt place. So the shirts should actually ready to ship in as quickly as a week. If you want a first go at them, they can preordered in the store. They're green shirts with dark green ink!
They'll be ready in plenty of time for C2E2, which is in Chicago on April 16-18, where I will totally be. That's only a month from today! If you need advance tickets to the show so you don't have to wait in line, there's just four days left to do so. This show boasts to be huge! There's all sorts of crazy guests I totally have to meet myself, even. Oh, and the voice of Batman, Kevin Conroy, is gonna be there. Sweetness. [2010/03/14 11:00 pm] Shortpacked!@TNI:As sculpted by Frank Cho. Shortpacked!:Sean Connery is apparently on this same list.
I supplied Allspark.com with some Animated Wreck-Gar art. Check it out.
Patch Together sent me this photo of Mike's statue, painted, this morning! Sweeet! I've asked them to change the way they paint his collar, but otherwise I figger that's what he's gonna look like. He's still up for preorder!
Hey, look, Amber's cosplaying as her least favorite Turtle.
And, of course, Book 3, Shortpacked! Is Totally Gay is still in the middle of preorders. Today starts Week 2, actually! So let's rattle off the sales pitch again:
This book covers the strips starting March 20, 2006, through September 8, 2006, plus a couple dozen Toy News International strips. There's also (sometimes) insightful commentary from me on every page, plus "Galasso's Secret Files" on all the employees in the store.
Book 3 also has a foreword written by Bob Forward. (It's a Forward Foreword!) It's true, there's an introduction from the co-story editor of Beast Wars, as well as the writer of episodes for Transformers Animated, BraveStarr, G.I. Joe, the Legend of Zelda shorts for the Super Mario Bros Super Show, and... the He-Man/She-Ra Christmas episode, of course. Naturally, I am beside myself. It is a great honor.
So, basically, this book is really awesome. Let's sum up: 136 pages, full color, buttload of strips and special materials, and there's a foreword by the guy who killed Dinobot. As of this writing, a third of the EXTRA (signed/doodled/numbered) versions are gone! So if you want the special version, you gotta hop to it! [2010/03/12 11:23 pm]
David McGuire has a book of his awesome comic strip Gastrophobia coming soon! It's called "The 12 Labours" and sells for $12. That's just $1 per labor! The book is due in April, and I recommend getting your hands on a tangible version of his work.
I'm trying out this Formspring.me thing, in which people can send me questions and I answer them and I can choose to port some of the answers through Twitter. I can't guarantee I'll answer all the questions I'll get (I have, uh, over a hundred queued at the moment), but if it's a good and/or humorous one, I'll certainly take a whack at it.
Meanwhile, thanks for sending me those preorders for Shortpacked! Book 3! We've sold through about a third of the signed/doodled/numbered EXTRA! editions, so that means there's not many of them left. Also, we're expecting the final painted prototype of the Mike statue any day now. I can't wait to see it! Preorders for him are still ongoing.
I'm also gearing up for my convention schedule this year, and I should have a wider variety of wacky things to offer you.
It's baffling to me, considering how gung-ho Robin was about the last candidate in last Wednesday's strip and her subsequent continued gung-ho-ness, why a handful of people thought Ethan's date would be anyone else! I have no idea why other folks were suggested. It was gonna be Mike, it was gonna be that chinbeard fanboy dude, it was gonna be Thad. But, well, hey, surprise. It's this guy. Exactly who Wednesday's strip said it'd be. Hooray! :)
Here's the rest of the Thanagarians from the six-pack "Starscrossed" set. The set also came with a normal Batman and a normal Green Lantern, but I think by now you can probably picture them flawlessly in your head. This picture's just of the new folks.
Not to surprisingly, it's just a male and female mold used twice. Hawkman's evil doppelganger Hro Talak and his gayly jealous sidekick Kragger are the same toy with different heads and deco. It is nice that their arms are sculpted to have their armor's detail on them, rather than it being only paint. And equally expected are Paran Dul and Hawkgirl's mold-sharing. Unlike the dudes, though, their arms aren't sculpted to have the armor detail. It's just painted on.
And thank god for those new belts. We don't need more flesh belts. [2010/03/10 11:12 pm] Shortpacked!:Solitude!
I'm back in the JLU saddle, baby!
As I mentioned a few days ago (and drew a strip about), I took that anonymous guy's suggestion and just ordered myself some damn JLU six-packs off the Internet. Great news, right! Ahahahaha, guess what, Graham was in the middle of being the winning bidder for a "Starcrossed" six-pack on eBay... for my birthday. So he was understandably a little frustrated when he read that I'd finally gotten my hands on a set. D'oh! But he let himself get outbid, and he told me to just open the one I ordered when it got here. I thought maybe he'd just wrap up the one I got for me or something, but no, he wants to get me a surprise gift, like it's my birthday or something.
The Hawkgirl in the middle is from the Starscrossed set. I think she's my favorite Hawkgirl toy of the three. It's rough, because the yellow and black outfit is definitely my favorite in the cartoon, but ... the Thanagarian Armor version doesn't have, y'know, a flesh belt. Also, the colors on the Thanagarian Armor version are so vibrant. They're just a little darker all around, and the eyes are painted better. She looks really nice. And usually, yellow trumps most other colors in my eyes, but the dark blue, red, and gold really work well together.
The Hawkgirl on the right is from the other six-pack in the wave. This is Hawkgirl with "Eclipso" shards embedded in her skin, making her evil. You can tell because she has no painted irises! Spoooky.
I wish in real life when people did evil things, their eyes glowed. It'd make politics way more interesting. Or way less interesting. I'm undecided. [2010/03/09 10:59 pm] Shortpacked!:Have I done mirrors before? This felt new, anyway.
Yeah, I ain't drawn anything on paper for over a week now. Yay, Cintiq! And for whatever reason, it leads to more extravagant backgrounds.... probably because it's much easier to doodle them in with colored brushes, versus the usual ink-then-color route. We'll see where this takes me.
Bob Forward, who wrote the Foreword to Shortpacked! Book 3 (preorder it now!), is mostly responsible for my insane Dinobot collection. The remaining percentage is due to the sheer number of times they redecoed and retooled his toy. I have no idea what it is that compels me to own every version of a mold once they reuse it more than four or five times. Though I thankfully fight this 99% of the time. But with Dinobot? He's my boy.
So in that vein, this is Kabaya's "candy toy" model kit Dinobot. See, in Japan, you don't pay tax on candy, so Kabaya makes these kits and various figurines based on various properties, throws in an obligatory stick of shitty gum, and woo. No tax to pay from Japanese children with little money. I have a couple of these Kabaya products in the Hot Shot variety, what with the Shrine, but none of those were transformable.
Well, sorta transformable. This Dinobot figure needs assembly in more ways than one. It comes as you see in the first photo, of course, and then you snap and peg him together. But the transformation requires taking him apart a little and rearranging him. The toy's not an expensive thing, but it wasn't supposed to be. Remember, these are supposed to be cheap. Almost as cheap as the gum. To transform this Dinobot from robot mode to raptor mode, you take off his legs at the hip, peg those underneath, take off his robot arms, switch them so the elbows bend the right way, and then remove his tail just like his "real" toy. The tail splits apart to reveal a sword, same as usual, though this rotate blade doesn't spin, of course.
It was pretty fun to do. For a guy who has as many Dinobots as I do, the act of physically putting the design together with my own hands was kind of... cathartic. Except for the stickers. They actually stuck on the plastic better than I thought they would, considering this thing is 15 friggin' years old. I was sorta suspecting them to just flake off the paper onto the ground when I opened the box. Naw, they still stuck. And they stuck just well enough it's possible they haven't degraded at all. I can totally imagine this being as well as they stuck back in 1996. That is, not very well. And, heh, isn't it always the way that using Superglue adheres your skin better to the plastic than it does the sticker paper? Ahahaha. Man, the teeth sticker that wraps around the front of the dinosaur head is the worst. The absolute worst.
But all in all, it's a neat little artifact to have. In robot mode, it's generally Basic-sized ("Scout" in modern jargon). And he has a little rotate blade and a rigid grill structure.
Just don't eat the gum. For the love of God, no.
EDIT: Holy crap, I was just asked on Twitter why I totally neglected to mention that March 9 was the anniversary of Dinobot's death. "Code of Hero" aired on March 9, 1998. Man, because I'm a loser, that's why. Dudes! [2010/03/08 11:01 pm] Shortpacked!: This is not a permanent character model change.
Since I put up Shortpacked! Book 3 for preorderyesterday, I am contractually obligated to mention this either every day until the end of time or until when I get enough preorders, whichever comes first. Such is the sad reality of self-employment. (Book 3 up for preorder.)
But this is still a toy blog, so there still must be toys!
I got Shattered Glassreprolabels for my SG Decepticons a lifetime ago, but I didn't get the SG Autobot symbols until just recently. I'm not as enthusiastic about the evil mirrorverse Autobots. Do they have Ravage? No. No, they don't. So nyeah.
But here is my photo of my repurposed toys as mirrorverse characters. These are (clockwise from the top right) Brawn,Beachcomber, Camshaft, Huffer, and Arcee. They are all evil in various ways, except Huffer, who seems to be less evil, somehow. Well, he's way more friendly, at any rate.
The only speedbump was Brawn, on whom I needed to use a sticker to cover up his Sector Seven logo, but that's just below an unpainted sculpted Autobot logo. So, uh, yay, he looks a little ridiculous with one logo right above another. Well, the original toy expected you to ignore the sculpted faction logo, so I guess I can continue doing that.
