I'm almost always into the little GIJOE dudes we get at Comic-Con, but not so much the giant vehicles they come with.  I am rarely into Joe vehicles ever.  They're huge and they take up space and they're not characters.  Now, the SDCC Joe vehicles for the past three years have been characters -- Transformers characters, even -- but even then I'm not really sold on them.  I have versions of these guys that transform into robots and take up less space.  But if you want to get, like, Decepticon Destro or a GIJOE-style Bludgeon, you also have to swallow the giant-ass rides they come with.  The Shockwave HISS from last year is still the centerpiece of our kitchen table 'cuz there's no where else for it to go.

Currently, Harmony Gold is famously trying to sue Hasbro for this year's Jetfire, claiming it infringes on their ownership of Robotech.  I don't know how that'll go down, but the stated terms of their suit is kind of over-reachy.  They seriously want everyone to return their purchased toys to them.  You do your best, guys, we'll see how that works out.  But the event raised my interest in this Giant Thing I Happened To Buy With My Bludgeon enough to try to start putting it together Wednesday night.

Immediately I had regret.  This thing is so huge.  I mean, I have some huge toys, but there's this algorithm in my brain where the size of a toy needs to match my desire to possess it, and my desire to own this giant Jetfire thing was almost zero, but its footprint in my house was titanic.  I actually started to feel a little claustrophobic as the damn thing took up half the couch as I stickered it.  Halfway through the process, I texted my friend Ron to please remove this thing from my house for me.  (He gladly accepted, but he's currently out of town.)

The jet itself is a Skystriker.  A big thing!  It's even bigger with the newly-tooled jet booster pack that you attach to it, which makes it look more like Jetfire.  There's even room for a new seat in that extra part section.  Seriously, this thing is large.  The stickers are... well, they fall in line with Metroplex's stickers, but less fit-where-it's-supposed-to-go-y.  There're some mislabeled things and some stuff that doesn't exactly fit, and the paper likes to come up along with the sticker part basically always, so it helps to have fingernails.  Don't even try to get the striping around the cockpit to match up.  It won't.  You're just gonna have to agree with yourself that it's gonna be imperfect.

It's actually a pretty neat giant-ass Jetfire.  If you have room for a giant-ass Jetfire.

I do not.

No, you can't have my Baroness.  Stop asking.

It was both awesome and terrible that we got all these Transformers Kre-O Micro-Changers this year.  It was awesome because, well, duh, these guys are great and there's an insane variety and breadth of character choice.  There's guys like Hook and Warpath, sure, they're not too surprising, but we also get folks like Scorch (as "Singe") and Bludgeon and Airachnid.  The character choices are from all of Transformers, and that makes them interesting to me.

What's terrible about it is that now that I knew there was going to be all these interesting guys, I kind of wanted to have all of them.  I wanted to start collecting them, rather than just choosing the ones I wanted.  Having a larger and more populated "world" made the line "real" to me.  And so I ended up buying a lot of old sets I had passed over to get guys like Bumblebee and Sideswipe.  Thankfully, by the time I got to them they were old enough to start going on heavy clearance.

Anyway, check out this sweet Bludgeon Kreon.  He's a Micro-Changer, meaning he's in one of twelve blind-bagged figures.  Other than a stamped imprint of a number code on the back of the bag, you don't know which one you're getting, like a pack of trading cards.  What makes him a Micro-Changer specifically is that he comes with some extra parts to give him a very crude vehicle mode.  Basically, you pretend this dude lying down with treads on his arms and a barrel on his back is a tank.  Not the best-looking thing, but given the idea requires that a little dude be in the center of whatever you're putting together, plus the whole $2.99 price tag, it's hard to complain.  Besides, folks just want these things for the figures themselves anyway.

The only real annoying part is the piece Kre-O uses to attach things onto the back of the robot mode.  It's always these military flak jacket pieces that fold over the entire torso.  Sure, the peg on the back is there so you can give him kibble, but the front of the flak jacket covers up all the distinguishing deco on the front.  LEGO has pieces that connect over the neck and hang over the back of the torso only, leaving the front of the torso bare, but Kre-O must not.

But it's a building set, so you can always just leave off that stuff if you want and go with the bare figure.

Here's the number codes if you find a box of these guys and want to select one you want.  Not every case has a full set of dudes -- sometimes it's almost everybody, but sometimes it's just three guys that repeat over and over.  It seems to always be random.

40 - Singe
41 - Inferno
42 - Springer
43 - Warpath
44 - Quickslinger
45 - Rampage
46 - Insecticon
47 - Blast Off
48 - Hook
49 - Dirge
50 - Airachnid
51 - Bludgeon

You know it's been a lull in Transformers purchases when the previous batch has already started breaking in the interim.

I was just transforming him out of tank mode!  I noticed Bludgeon on the shelf in tank mode next to the television and he looked like he needed to be fiddled with.  So I start pulling his hands out of his forearms and... oh no.

Well, that won't do.  And Bludgeon is one of my favorites!  And he has to be able to hold swords, so gluing the fingers back on and leaving it the hell alone is not the answer. So he must be replaced.  Immediately.

My mail-in Recon Ravage came with a $5 off coupon, so I ran over to Walmart this morning.  Thankfully, Bludgeon's still plentiful.  If this happened a few months or a few years from now, I'd be in trouble!  The coupon says $5 off any Transformers purchase of $20 or more, which must include sales tax, because this Bludgeon started at a sale price of $19.97 and it still worked.

Let my misfortune serve as a cautionary tale to others.  Be careful with your Bludgeon hands!  Don't shove that sword in.  Of course, you kinda have to shove it in, because it's a tight grip.

So, basically, you're screwed.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha.