So I'm surfing around the Webcomics Wikipedia and stumble across... well, some Gonterman.

Remember Foxfire? The strip about a down-on-his-luck cartoonist, turned away from all manner of comics publishers, but given a thumbs up and a blessing from Stan "The Man" Lee? The strip about the self-same cartoonist who goes home and finds a box of sentient fursuit on his front porch and puts it on? The strip It's Walky! had an April Fools Day switch with in 2000? (Damn you, Terrence Marks!)

Well, I guess it's back. Reconceived! Redrawn! It's... it's... ULTIMATE Foxfire! Now with less Stan Lee and more homosexuality! (The lead character actually seems to be gay in this one, instead of stubbornly closeted. It's a huge step up from Gonterman's older fanfiction where he really seems to be violently bigoted towards the idea. Perhaps he is out of the closet himself? It would make a lot of stuff make more sense.)

But yeah.

Good times, man. Good times.

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Sure! Have some Transformers news from BotCon that you've probably already read everywhere else with better pictures. Here at Shortpacked! we stick to the old adage Late or never -- at this point, what's the difference?



My favorite news ever is what Hasbro's got cooked up for the Beast Wars 10th Anniversary. Seriously, they're actually DOING something for it. It's amazing. We had to wait until the 20th anniversary of G1 to get something special. On the other hand, there's nothing like realizing it's been almost 10 years since you started college. Geez.

When we first got whiff of the Beast Wars 10th Anniversary stuff in Target computers, we figgered it'd just be the Robot Masters Optimus Primal and Megatron ported over to America. And even though I already got those guys, I was planning on getting them anyway. Why? Because Beast Wars gives me a stiffy, 'cuz I'm a whore for it. If Optimus Primal came up to me and asked me to drop my pants, I'd be all "Hell yes." And he'd squint at me, and I'd amend, "Hell yes, SIR."

But no, we're not getting that imported shit. We're getting show-accurate redecos. Two waves (at least) of them! And each figure in the first two waves comes with a part to form Transmutate, a character that showed up in one episode to be poignant and die, and thus was never made into a toy. Fuck yeah, man. Fuck yeah.

Each toy is also packaged with a DVD containing an episode that features that character. For example, Waspinator comes with "Possession." (Ironically, Waspinator is possessed by Starscream the whole time. Poor guy never gets a break. True to form!)

Wave one:
Waspinator
Rhinox
Cheetor
Wave two (not seen yet):
Dinobot
TM Rattrap
(TM?) Tarantulas

And on top of all that, late next year we're getting new-mold Optimus Primal and beast Megatron. We were shown resin prototypes of the two guys in Hasbro's panel presentation, and they were amazing. Primal seemed to be an amalgam of all his various toys, and Megatron was like the original beast t-rex toy on steroids. Both are deluxes (though Megatron's apparently a tall deluxe) and both have Cybertron-esque Cyber Key-activated features.

Finally, Hasbro's fanservicing my favorite series.

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Ricochet is one of the seven figures in the Descent Into Evil box set available to those who bought the largest BotCon prereg pack. He's the one I paid the least amount of attention to, so I figgered I'd talk about him first today.

Hoo boy is this guy black. The picture up above is one I took of Ricochet next to three of the other four versions of his mold. (I don't own R-Blade.) Other than his light blue missiles and blue transparent cockpit/visor, all of his plastic colors are now black. Hurray!

To compensate for this, however, Ricochet is loaded with new paint apps. Not quite enough to make me forget he's entirely black, but enough to make him interesting. The silver lining around his visor is really great. That, his fist, armfin, and some lower leg details are elements of the mold that have never been painted before. In jet mode, he sports a jagged red electricity(?) pattern.

Black with red, silver, and electric blue is not a new color scheme for a Transformers convention toy. Last year's Megazarak featured the same colors, though the concentration of silver and red was more prominent than in Ricochet.

Still. Black. Lots of it. I wish they would have made the plastic in his upper arms and thighs gray or slate blue or pale yellow or something. But oh well. But hey, it's just one black toy, right! They were just getting the black out of their system on this one, I'm sure.

...

Ricochet's bio writes him as a spy. A somewhat shady and uncharismatic spy. I sat in on the rehearsals/try-outs for the BotCon script reading which features him, and it made him interesting to me. He described himself as a guy who did the dirty work that Optimus Prime wouldn't admit that needed to be done to win the war. It was a nice angle.

Sadly, we found out in the actual script reading that he was actually Obsidian in disguise. Damn.

So I guess I'm back to slightly better than "sure, whatever" on him. I don't know where "sure, whatever" falls on a scale of 1 to 10, but probably not very high.

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So I spent $50 recklessly after Expensive Botcon today on Ultimate Spider-Man for the Game Cube. It's fun to swing.

The thing about swinging, that's amazing, is that unlike the recent free-environ Spider-Man games, you actually have to be low enough on the level to attach your web to actual objects for swinging. No jumping from the Baxter Building, shooting a web up into the open sky, and having it attach to a cloud or whatever. If you're out in a football field? No deal.

It's groundbreaking!

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http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_daily_show/extras/auction.jhtml

Give me $2000 dollars!

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