Here’s some quick Marvel pics from the Hasbro “Early Look” tonight.
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Hasbro is hosting an “Early Look” event before New York Comic Con opens tomorrow. To get you the pics you want as fast as I can, I’m hooking you into my Instagram feed. If you’re on Instagram, follow me at afpron – that’s for AFP Ron, not AF Pron :). Stay tuned for better pictures soon.
Here’s my second attempt on Bucky Cap vs Arnim Zola. I’m just going to jot down a few thoughts as I’ve got to get out the door.
I think the angle of the shot helps sell the thought that they’re on a raised platform. I tried to accentuate that with light coming up from underneath the Hydra goons. Not sure that I’ll come back to this again, but if I do, I’ll give hawkinshand’s shot a try. It’ll be a few days anyways, because Bucky did his patriotic duty and sacrificed parts of himself for a custom.
As always, your feedback is welcome. Thanks for looking!
I am probably going to have to give this another try at some point – I only had a short while to set this up and snap some pictures, and when it came time to do some post work I didn’t much like the composition. As much as I miss having a Build-a-Figure in the third wave of (Return of) Marvel Legends, I do like the interconnecting bases. The idea for this shot was to use them as a raised platform, with Bucky fighting through the Hydra troopers towards Arnim Zola.
Right off the bat, I should switched Zola and Bucky around – eyes (at least in most Western cultures) will track from left to right, and so this shot would probably work better if the eye could follow Bucky’s shield from left to right. I think the idea that the platform is raised has been lost because of the angle of the shot. And then there’s this big empty spot in the middle of the shot. It’s not that I don’t believe in negative space – I just didn’t really think it through here and it seems off.
Any thoughts on how this shot could be improved?
If you’re a customizer, you’ve probably ended up with a custom with a wobbly or loose head. Maybe the existing socket on the head you’ve swapped in is too big, or you drilled out a hole in a resin head cast that’s wide enough to fit over the peg only to find it flops around like it’s on a bobble head. Because I’m a lazy customizer, I had around half a dozen “finished” customs that were like this. For some, the heads would flop around mercilessly. For others, if you knocked the shelf the heads would just fall off. Pretty bad – I know.
Faced with this situation, a pro customizer would use a two part compound like Apoxie Sculpt or Kneadatite, fill the socket part ways and attach the head – and before it was completely cured, would twist the head so it wouldn’t be stuck in one spot. (Or, as some of you will no doubt be thinking, a pro customizer would have drilled the right size socket to begin with…) But I’ve found a much easier way – with silicone sealant. This is the stuff people use for things like aquarium repairs (I think) and… ok, I’m not a hardware guy, so I have no idea what else it’s used for. All I know is that I use it to attach heads to action figures. It takes five minutes and is super easy.
Considering how successful the Iron Man and Avengers movies have been, I think Hasbro has shown a lot of restraint in Marvel Legends; it seems like Iron Man is showing up only every other wave – the Iron Man armor from the first Return of ML wave was the Extremis armor, and here in wave 3 it’s the Neo-Classic armor. While this figure is hurt a little by the slightly smaller-scaled sculpts that were originally due for release in the 6-inch Iron Man line, there’s still a lot of goodness with this figure.
The best thing for me is that Hasbro has figured out how to do the finish on Iron Man. The first of the resurgence of Hasbro’s Iron Man was the classic armor that came with the two-packs. Great candy apple red, but the yellow plastic was kind of dull. They fixed the gold on the Extremis armor from the start of this year, but it was the red that looked a little flat. With the Neo-Classic armor, both red and gold pop.
There’s no Iron Man planned for the first ML wave in 2013, but Hasbro’s saving it up for an Iron Man wave of Legends to get the boost from the Iron Man 3 movie. I can’t wait to see the comic book version of the Iron Monger.