Out of all of this year’s BotCon toys, Shattered Glass Straxus was the only one I got to find out about at the convention itself. All the others were leaked via lists or stolen samples, and the identity of SG Longarm was revealed officially the Wednesday morning before I left for the con. And so in a really oldschool way, I got to find out what a BotCon toy was when I arrived, like it was 1998 or something up in this shiz!
SG Straxus was the “attendee freebie,” meaning if you buy the immense box set and arrive at the convention to pick it up like you’re supposed to, you get a free extra guy. If you buy the set and don’t attend, no dice. I was kind of surprised to learn that the freebie was a mold not seen elsewhere in the set! The freebie tends to be something else used elsewhere but redecoed, like one of the guys with a new head so they get a second use out of the new head. No, this was a mold unique to the set! Sweetness.
If you’ve been reading my website for any amount of time, you know my fondness for Straxus. He was a comic book-only character for decades until he finally got toy-ified in 2010. I’m happy, then, that he gets a toy of his mirrorverse self. I kind of feel like it legitimizes him more. He’s an increasingly important guy! And while this weekend was the first time we heard about his SG figure, we were introduced to the idea of an SG Straxus in the various SG prose stories long ago. And so it’s also nice to have a toy of that guy. All we knew about him was that he was a poet, which is, as you’d imagine, the opposite of his “normal” self, which was a megalomaniacal despot. So, woo, poet Transformer toy! With a battle pick axe!
The colors on this guy are the icing on the cake. See, long ago Germany published some KIND OF REALLY BAD versions of the original Marvel Comics. Their covers were on crack, full of art swipes and insane color choices. And one of these insane color choices/art swipes was the floating head of Straxus decked out in gold, black, and bright green.
You can connect the dots.
We’re running out of wacky things to reference, guys.
I’m pretty happy.
Sweet. Dallas is pretty far away from Wisconsin, otherwise I would have been there to pick up my box set “like I’m supposed to”. Straxus is awesome looking, and a good use of an underutilized mode for sure.
Plus he’s a poet, which is like, all sorts of awesome.
Dallas is equally far from Ohio!
*Sigh*…….I know…(hangs head in shame…)
At first I thought maybe they were going for Scrounge colors.
Also, please tell me that the comic pictured actually features a scene of Straxus’ floating head firing lasers at a tiny Optimus Prime with a larger Optimus Prime looking on nearby.
*Later, after reading the comic summary on TFwiki*
Fuck.
My favorite thing is the smiling child. He’s so happy about the insane mayhem.
Shattered straxus is amazing….
but unfortunately, still not wort the airfare from australia.
Now if we’d had random smiling german kids…. nah. still not worth it.
Dont mind me, i’ll be over here, a nixture of happy and jelous.
So does his sonic cannon fire weaponized poetry? I wonder what metre it has to be at…