As I'm sitting here in the hotel lobby adjacent to the Connecticut Convention Center, I figgered I should link you to my last Fans! page.  Until the next time, anyway!  It was super fun!

Now to go upstairs and wake up Maggie.  Almost time to get checked in or whatevs.

Maggie and I are poised for our 10-11 hour journey tomorrow to the fair lands of Connecticut!  That's right, ConnectiCon is upon us!  By loading up the program guide PDF thinger on their site, I have discovered that I am at booth 904, which is in the far back with all the other webcomics.  I say "far back," but it's not like this is Comic-Con San Diego, so you'll find me easy enough.  Just look for the area not entirely covered with scroll art of Rei Ayanami.

It looks like my booth is next to Carlos Ferro's, with whom I did a toy collecting panel last year and was told some time ago that I might be doing one again!  It might be on Saturday at 2:30?  That's when I find a toy-collecting-themed panel on the schedule, so I'm guessing that's it.  There are also various webcomics panels that I am not sure if I am invited to.

ConnectiCon is always an ongoing unveiling of surprises.

Anyway, I'll have Roomies! book 1, Shortpacked! books 2 and 3, some magnets, some bumper stickers, some art prints, and the super-awesome Brings Back the Eighties poster.  I'll also have Maggie, who will be much better at conversation than me.

Hey guys!  Gearing up for ConnectiCon here.  (It's this weekend!  Come see me!)

I also want to draw your attention to an eBay auction I just started.  It's for a bagged SG Ravage/Scorch and comes with a (practically) one-of-a-kind SG Ravage bio card!  The toy didn't come with one, so I made one up and printed it out.

So, woo, you get Ravage (unopened), his accessory Scorch (unopened), bio cards for both (one custom-made by me), and Scorch's instructions.  The auction ends in seven days, just in time for me to be back from ConnectiCon so I can mail it to the lucky winner.

Enjoy!

Everything broke this last week.  I swear, everything!

The morning of BotCon, my glasses broke.  The legs of one of my lighting studio lamps broke off.  On the way home, my laptop stopped recognizing its wireless card.  Leader Starscream tore a hinge.   That same lighting studio lamp burst a bulb.  One of the legs of our bed frame snapped.  (woo hoo)  We had to take Pirate Ham to the vet.

Clearly I buy insurance for all the wrong things.

Well, Starscream's glued.  The lamp bulb is replaced (but still can't stand).  Pirate Ham has some medicine to control his eye inflammation.  This morning I got new glasses.

This stuff should not happen all at once.

Anyway, back to toys.  I now have five versions of the Universe not-a-Nissan-Z mold.  I already had Prowl, Silverstreak, and Smokescreen, and BotCon gave us two more.  Thankfully, one of them is the best version of the mold yet!  That guy is Rapido!

Rapido was rank 10 the year he came out.  Funny story, an Optimus Prime came out that year, too, and he was rank 9!  Ha ha ha.  Wonder what the story behind that is.  In honor of Rapido's enviable rank, this new toy's tech spec card gives him a rank of 10+.  See, he's not usually in charge, but is authorized to take charge in emergencies.  That's the sort of guy he is.  (Also, his tech spec card is written entirely in Spanish.  This is awesome.)

Another odd quirk about the original Rapido is that due to the engineering, you couldn't see his head over the top of the hood.  Kind of comical.  Well, new Rapido fixes that!  Rapido's head, since it's the Prowl/Silverstreak/Smokescreen mold, is up on a big ol' neck plank!  You can see it fine!  And what an awesome head it is.  I think it's one of the best heads BotCon has ever done.  It's nice and sharp and distinctive, and the teal face really works.

The head works in great concert with the rest of the body.  The red, teal, silver, and black is "loud" but in a fairly classy way.  And he is the only version of the mold which doesn't throw its door kibble at me as I try to transform it.  It stays on the whole way through.  That is impressive.

Color wise, head wise, and tolerance wise, I think he's a winner.

Plus, dudes, he's friggin' Rapido.  Represent.

(And there's some left over from the convention!)

Ethan is me.  Well, only sometimes, but this is definitely one of those times.

(The dog is based on Meredith Gran's adorable puppy, Heidi, who I got to meet last Wednesday during the book signing.  She loves her ball more than life itself.)

This weekend is ConnectiCon!   I will travel across the country to Hartford, Connecticut, where the folks sure love their Dunkin Donuts.  Don't they know that I'm a Tim Horton's boy?  I'm told I'll be down in the Real Dealer's Room this year!  So you'll be able to find me!  I'll be next to the other webcomics.  Just look around the guy dressed as Goku, and that'll be me right there.  Maggie will also be with me, to make sure I don't bite anyone for trying to touch my tennis ball action figures.

I should probably make a Shattered Ravage print or something.  I think his popularity has eclipsed my own.

I have wanted this exact toy for the past six years.

Back when Transformers ended in North America in 1990ish, Europe still kept cranking out robots.  One of them was a redeco of Action Master Wheeljack as a new Decepticon named Slicer.  I didn't learn about this guy until about a decade later, after immersion in the Internets, but once I did I needed on.  Not the toy itself, really, but I really really wanted a transformable Wheeljack toy in Slicer's colors.  It seemed easy enough!  Well, sort of, since Generation 1 stuff was pretty dead at the time.

My desire gathered steam when Energon Downshift, Wheeljack's doppelganger, showed up in 2004.  Well, hell yes!  They could easily redeco that sucker into Slicer!  Easy buck for Hasbro, super love for me.  But it didn't happen for some reason probably related to nobody knowing/caring about Slicer.  (Also, whoops, there's an Autobot symbol molded onto his collarbone.)  But when Fun Publications got the convention/fan club  license in 2005, I had new people to pester for Slicer.  I photoshopped up a "fake convention set" with an Action Master theme which included Slicer from Energon Downshift.  I must have put Slicer-from-Energon-Downshift on my BotCon feedback form every year for five years.

Some time in 2008, when the Shattered Glass text stories were in full swing, Shattered Glass Wheeljack made an appearance, and, woo, he was Energon Downshift in Slicer colors!  So close!  So close I could taste it!  But I worried that we might get a Shattered Glass Wheeljack toy instead of a Slicer one.  The name on the profile card is a technicality, but a technicality that my brain would always register in the back of my cranium, even on pleasant days.  On the other hand, this deco-sharing might be the most practical way to get what I wanted in spirit, if not the letter?  Hmm.

And sweet hot damnation, 2010 is Hallelujah Time.  And "Decepticon Slice" is just as glorious as I have dreamed.  As I mentioned, he does have that Autobot logo sculpted into his collarbone, but it's painted purple like the Shattered Glass Autobot logo so you can use your Slicer toy as a Shattered Wheeljack if you wanted.  But he's nominally Slicer, which was my initial preference.

Over the course of BotCon weekend, I kept telling folks "Slicer was made just for me!"   To which they reminded me that if any of this year's set was "just for me," it was Shattered Ravage.  Well, fuck it, both are.  Also, most of the rest of the set.  They're all for me.  But Slicer is especially for me, because Slicer is my pipe dream come to life.  His vibrant blue and warm gray and copper warm up all the right neurons.  I do kind of think his translucents should have been orange to "match" his copper, but dark red will do.  It's what color  his windows are supposed to be, so I understand.  I love Slicer so much that I carried him around with me most of the weekend.  He rarely left my side.

On the other hand, they had to go and make him French.  Which means I've been pronouncing his name wrong all these years.  Hmm.

If there's anything unfortunate about him, it's that he was the Attendee Exclusive.  If you bought the full Primus box set and showed up at the convention, you got one.  To get a second one, you have to get another Primus box set.  So if you want both a Slicer and a Shattered Wheeljack, you're looking at eBay!  And since he's given one per person, no extras, he's gonna be an expensive find.

Ah well.  After he's done his rounds on my BotCon shelf, I'm gonna sit him next to his other Action Masters-who-got-transformable-toys brethren.  Hello, Axer!  Hello, Banzai-Tron and Gutcruncher!  Hello, this year's Double Punch!

(I have decided, incidentally, that the running boards kibble along Slicer's forearms are actually blades, like the ones on movie Sideswipe.  See, that's why they call him Slicer!)

In the past week I've amassed four new Ravages.  It wasn't my intent!  It just happened!

First was Shattered Glass Ravage.  Why I own him is fairly obvious.

Later during BotCon I picked up a Beast Wars Shadow Panther.  A black and yellow Cheetor redeco, he was originally a Takara release, but Hasbro imported him and sold him on their website for a while.  They couldn't get the name "Shadow Panther," so they called him "Tripredacus Agent."  Later, they'd do another Tripredacus Agent out of Transmetals 2 Cheetor who was supposed to be Ravage, included with a bio that insinuated that Shadow Panther was also Ravage in one of his aliases/disguises.  And then years later Beast Wars Sourcebook said Shadow Panther was a different guy who just has the exact same personality as Ravage so I'm not sure why they bothered, but screw that.  He's Ravage.

After getting home, Graham found me a Legends movie-style Ravage.  He is tiny and adorable and due to the jointing in his paws, he is excellent at waving.  He is a waving fiend.  Legends Ravage, the tiniest of movie Ravages, is easily the best of all of the movie Ravages.  I suggest you get him.

And finally, the day after I picked up the newest redeco of the movie Deluxe mold.  He's all right.  Nothing special.  He just soothes my OCD, is all.

Hahaha, thought it'd be a robot today, didn't you?  Lobo was waiting for me in a MattyCollector box when I got home from BotCon, so I gotta shove pictures of him into this blog some time.  Might as well be now!

I always enjoy the entirely new sculpt Justice League Unlimited figures.  They feel more "alive" than their usual plop-a-new-head-on-the-standard-body-and-call-it-a-day guys.  You can see just how nicely Mattel can sculpt these things when they're given free reign.  In that vein, Lobo is basically perfect.  He's asymmetrical and huge and round and angular all at the same time in different places.  Though he only really "works" in a typical standing pose, he's a joy to look at from all angles.

Not that I wouldn't balk at more plop-a-new-head-on-the-standard-body-and-call-it-a-day guys.  I need myself a Chronos the Time Thief, dammit.

After musing over which of my BotCon 2010 exclusives I had given the least love, I realized the answer was Scorch, otherwise known as SG Ravage's accessory.  And with good reason, too, because he didn't hold together very well and so I left him up in my hotel room to make sure I didn't lose any of him.  I'm happy to report that only some of this was an actual problem.  His arm, for example, that kept falling off was actually just a matter of improper assembly, meaning I needed to pop it fully onto the balljoint.  So that's fixed!  However, he is still a little too floppy overall and his chest/bumper/cowcatcher thing still likes to fall out.  I might try to glue that in later or something.  At least only one piece is falling out of him now instead of two.

I also don't have much attachment to Scorch.  Hell, I didn't even really know he existed before this set! He is a yellow/orange redeco of a toy I really really like, though, so I certainly don't mind him.  And after seeing him in this year's comic book, I do have an attachment to him now that I know what he's like.  Or, well, now that he's been written to be like something.  He was one of those blank slates, y'know.  But now I picture him as the Kup of the group, the curmudgeonly mentor to the young Second Generation of Transformers on Earth.  I like Kup, so I like Scorch.

But the thing everyone's talking about regarding Scorch is his hood's flame deco.  It points backwards!  Like you know how flame deco is always blowing towards the back of the car?  Well, here it's blowing towards the front.  Ooookay.  I think what happened is that on the original Scorch, there was this block of unpainted hood where the head popped out through or whatever, and the flames sprouted outwards from there.  And so they tried to duplicate this exactly, but the problem was the block was on the opposite end of the hood and so the flames go the wrong direction!  And then nobody noticed this and it stayed. Whoops.

(Because of this, in the comic Scorch always kinda looks like he's wearing this orange feathered boa.)

So anyway, I guess Scorch just drives that fast.  He's got a speed of 8, right?  That's almost 10!

I do wish the gray was a little bluer and his flame deco was a little redder.  The flame deco just doesn't stand out enough on the hood, since it's orange-on-yellow.  And a bluer gray, I feel, might have been a little more visually attractive.  (The photos of the toy on BotCon's tall standee display thing had a much bluer gray, and it looked fantastic.)  A bluer gray also might have looked nicer on Ravage's tail, since that's where they share plastic.

Overall, he's a yellow/orange version of a toy I love (as I said), and he (technically) comes with my biggest canonical contribution to the Transformers mythos.  Plus I've grown to like his characterization.  It's just too bad about the small things.

I warn you, in the coming days I am going to gush over every single other toy in this set.  Multiple boners.

I've been complaining (sort of) about the lack of Transformers to buy over the past few months.  Well, that's certainly over.  Between the ten new guys I got at BotCon and the buttload of stuff that's starting to show up at Toys "R" Us, I officially have Too Much.  So much that I probably should have started blogging these guys days ago, or I'll never ever get through them!  I have to be at a convention in just about a week!

(Speaking of which, come see me at ConnectiCon!)

But first, lemme remind you to pick up the AllSpark Almanac II, which came out yesterday.  The first volume was like a veritable Transformers orgasm, and the second one is like a whole sexy evening of Transformers orgasms.  Even better, I have some contributions within it!  The back cover illustration is mine, plus I'm the guy who put together the Ninja Gladiator game sprites.  A few of the character selections were my own, and you can probably tell.  You'll know what I'm talking about.  Also, co-author Jim Sorenson kept me around to make sure he wasn't going too far off the edge on some things.  He does kinda need to be reigned in sometimes!  Unchecked, he's a monster!

Anyway, BotCon toys.  I think I'll talk about Cindersaur first, because conceptually I think he's the most high-concept BotCon figure in a while.  Back in Generation 2, they put out redecoes of both Flamefeather and Sparkstalker, but not the third and final dude Cindersaur.  Well, let's fix that!  And so BotCon gives us a G2 Cindersaur 15 years after the fact.  That's only really part of it.

I also like how they arrived at Cindersaur's color scheme.  They extrapolated it from the other two dudes!  See, both G2 Flamefeather and Sparkstalker had bright green and purple robot parts, but were mostly a third translucent color.  Flamefeather was green, purple, and translucent orange, while Sparkstalker was green, purple, and translucent red.  Well, clearly Cindersaur has to have green and purple robot parts, plus they gotta choose a third, dominant color.  And that's just what we got.

Unfortunately, plastic tolerance issues being what they were, BotCon Cindersaur was unable to make all of its blue translucent.  But it's the thought that counts.  And, hey, the toy won't split into pieces in a few years, so that's good.

I really like him 'cuz at this point anybody can throw an existing character's colors on a toy and call it a day.  That's done all the time!  It's old hat.  But how often do we see potential color schemes extrapolated from other toys?  Plus, hey, it's the Beast Wars 10th Anniversary Megatron mold, which is like the best Tyrannosaurus rex Transformer ever.  Hot damn.

Hmm.  Who should I do next?  Who from this set haven't I given enough love?  ... on the other hand, I also just got Leader Starscream today, so...