Shortpacked!-the-comic has talked about the upcoming series of 6-inch poseable Batman The Animated Series/The New Batman Adventures toys from DC Collectibles a few times, usually in terms of intense sexual arousal. Well they no longer upcoming, man, they are finally here.
They started with the thing I have always wanted forever and ever, which is New Batman Adventures Batman. I've probably talked about this before, but that version of Batman is my mind's eye's Batman. That will always be the real Batman to me, until I die. That's just how he looks. If he were a real guy standing in front of me, he'd look like that cartoon character somehow. Real people in suits, Batman doesn't look like that. Real life does Batman a disservice. He's actually a drawing, uncontained by your dumb physics and anatomy. He's a man-shaped tower of specific shapes and lines. That's just how Batman is.
And this is a toy of that.
Yeah, I've got kind of a pile of toys of that, but they were just prophets sent on ahead to herald the arrival of our true TNBA Batman toy, as if they were all John the Baptist. They were relatively tiny and immobile and they didn't come with such a wealth of important extra stuff. This Batman is not just the base humanoid figure, but he comes with three extra sets of hands. Don't like the clenched fists? He has open, relaxed palms you can swap in instead. Want him to be holding a grappling hook launcher? He comes with both a hand sculpted holding a grappling hook launcher and just the launcher itself as a separate accessory. (And a Batarang, obviously) He comes with an extra cape if you want the cape to hang over more of his shoulders and don't mind his shoulder articulation being more limited. And he comes with a friggin' stand with his character model sheet printed on it. There's a plastic rod you shove in the back of the stand that comes with a claw arm that can hold him in place over the stand, because, let's face it, this is a Bruce Timm design, so his feet are kind of small.
It's everything I've ever wanted.
However, I did break my first one. I don't think it was a very good specimen -- his leg popped off at the hip when I tried to splay it to the side, but it went back on easy enough. It was the wrist swapping that did the real damage -- the wrist peg broke clean off in the arm stump like chalk. I got a second one, though, and it was perfect. I have no idea how pervasive the bad QC ones are, but I definitely encountered one bad one myself. Hopefully not too many are like that first one. (On the same day I bought a Lil' Gotham Damian Wayne and his arm crumbled off out of the package, whoof. Geez, DC Collectibles.)
You have to remove Batman's head to swap the capes, and this requires excessive force. But this is something you want to do anyway, because once you loosen that head, make sure you don't push it back in all the way it was before. The head has a much greater range of movement now. He can look up and down and tilt his head to one side or the other. It's great. Otherwise it just turns left or right despite being on a ball joint.
So, yeah. This guy stands on my desk and I look over and can't believe it's a real physical object in front of me. It's one of the favorite things I own.
Just, uh, don't buy a bum one, somehow.
