Vandal Savage is one of my favorite characters, and that's almost entirely due to his appearance in the Justice League episode "Hereafter."  It was an episode in which the parts where Toyman kills Superman and there's a funeral for him and Lobo tries to force himself into the Justice League as a replacement... are not the most interesting parts of the episode.  No, Superman has actually been transported into the future!  And despite losing all his powers because of the deyellowification of the Sun's rays, he steals a car, siphons gas into it, grows a beard, fights some future dogs, slays their leader and wears him, and becomes their master.  Oh, and the world's that way because Vandal Savage kind of destroyed it a few days after Superman "died," but since he's immortal he's still around thousands of years later.  And kind of sad and crazy.

(My god, Phil Morris is awesome.  He's even awesome when he's Martian Manhunter on Smallville.  That is how awesome he is.)

And so I've reeeeeally been wanting a Vandal Savage toy, but I had no idea how much I also wanted a Future Beardy Superman toy until I saw that he would exist.  And  yet both of them almost didn't when their wave never reached retail. However, I am more than happy to get them belatedly and at a markup from MattyCollector.com.  "Hereafter" was one of my favorite episodes, and that's saying a lot considering half of it's about friggin' Superman.

They also came with Batman.  You probably don't need photos of him.  They didn't come with stands, but I used some in the photos anyway.  They also didn't come with an Atmosphere Destroying Missile Launcher, but, well, you know how it is.

It can't be great that both of the popular old guys in Transformers are just a color swap away from each other.  What I'm saying is, making Ironhide into Kup shouldn't result in that great of a Kup, yet it does.  I mean, it's good that it's a great Kup, y'know, for purposes of having a great Kup, but not so good in a world-building sense.  You don't want the two guys who share an archetype to be even more interchangeable.  It makes one of them redundant.

For some reason, the toy that was originally designed and solicited as Transformers Prime Deluxe Class Ironhide, based on Ken Christensen's design for Prime Ironhide, ended up being redecoed and released as Kup instead.  And like I said, it works pretty well.  They're both pickup trucks who are old guys who have windows on their chest, and neither of them is particularly shy with weaponry.  But Kup is green and Ironhide is red.   This is how you tell the two old guys apart.

The design itself is a great hybrid of elements of various Ironhide incarnations, particularly his G1 and live-action movie versions.  He's red and has his mohawked dome head with the cylinder ears and a windshield chest, but he's a pickup truck with giant cannons on his arms, his head embedded within his massive shoulders.  Since this version of the toy is Kup, I've not been attaching his giant cannons to his arms, opting to combine them into a larger  hand-held cannon.  It makes him look less Ironhidey.

Ironhide's character is pretty huge, especially in these post-Michael Bay days, and this toy's design reflects that.  What I mean to say is his head is tiny compared to his body.  In a more perfect world, he would have been a Voyager Class toy.  Instead, he's the size of Deluxe Arcee and with a head half the size.  It makes him look kinda Classicsy, really, since a frequent feature of G1 toys is their pinheadedness.  He's got a small head and he's blocky and rectangley.  Plus he has a nose.  Deluxe is a better size for Kup, I think, but his tiny head makes him  look really out of place next to other Prime toys.

I like how the doors fold in half to make his forearms.  I don't like how hard it is to get the center of his hood to split off from the rest of his hood and headlights.  I was afraid I was gonna break it when I tried to separate them the first time.  They click together pretty solidly.  After a few tries, the hood comes apart more easily, and also comes off the hinge entirely, which it's not supposed to do.  But if I put it back on upside-down in robot mode, that actually solves the problem of it sticking out pretty annoyingly from his back.  So, hey, making lemonade.

I'm sad this guy isn't who he was originally supposed to be, with no known stateside release at the moment, but I do like Kup way better than Ironhide, so that works for me.

UPDATE: I have added an image of Deluxe Kup next to Cyberverse Commander Ironhide because many folks are apparently confused about Kup's size and there was no way to slip any more iterations of the word "Deluxe" into this blog post without sounding like a jerk.

Within the past two waves of Legion Class (the smallest!) Transformers toys, there've been some older guys redecoed into new folks who otherwise don't have toys. And I'll pick them up! Why not? New guys!  Plus two of them were molds I hadn't owned before.

Flamewar is the most interesting character choice.  The original Flamewar was a BotCon 2005 exclusive toy and since then she has only appeared in BotCon and Collectors' Club-related materials, until now.  Like before she's a redeco of a motorcycle Arcee toy.  But now she's got a grudge against Arcee as well!  ...basically, she's Airachnid.  But now in that "I hate you and want to kill you but I am also wearing your skin" sort of way.  Her packaging art doesn't dispel any creepiness.

There's also Fallback, which is what Hasbro has to call Outback these days for steakhouse reasons.  (Yeah, it's a restaurant, but they also hold the trademark for toys for some reason.  Probably merchandise.)  Fallback is a redeco of Legion Class Breakdown.  Like Flamewar, he hasn't been mentioned on the cartoon, but in the most recent episode, Optimus Prime ordered his troops to "Fall back!" and so I like to pretend that Fallback is always just off-screen where we can't see him and that sometimes Optimus Prime yells at him.

Tailgate has been mentioned and seen on the cartoon, as he is Arcee's notorious first ill-fated partner.  He was a redeco of Cliffjumper in the cartoon as well, so this is a good use of the Cliffjumper Legion Class toy.  His transformation is crazy and I love him.  It's amazing how much versatility you can get out of a pile of ball joints.  He's seriously impressive for his size.

If you don't care about getting new characters, I'd still get Tailgate just for the hell of it.  He's pretty and his toy is a neat thing to keep around in your pocket.

Hey, some of you may know Josh Fruhlinger from his daily newspaper comic strip commentary at Comics Curmudgeon.  Well, now you can also know him from his United States President Slash Fic Blog, Hail to the Slash.  Josh commissioned art from me for the title!  I have provided the too-hot-for-blog extra slobber version to the left.  The full and final version of the graphic can be seen at the site itself, of course, as well as lots of stories about Presidents sodomizing each other.

I am still cranking out the 100 "Crisis" poster orders!  I have approximately 75 of them in the mail.  What complicates things is that this is also the week that my three literal tons of Dumbing of Age book 1 and Shortpacked! book 1 reprints arrived!  (See top image!) And so I'm also working on those at an equally furious pace.  I will probably have... 100 of them ready to go out the door to the post office on Monday?  That is out of roughly 600 orders, so please bear with me.  Those first 100 are from the folks who didn't ask for any extras, since I wanted to get a huge chunk of them ready to be mailed as soon as possible -- you know, to get some feeling of immediate accomplishment.  Just throwing books in postage pre-paid envelopes and slapping labels on.  It'll be much slower going once I hit the international orders and folks who pledged for sketches.

So I'll be keeping busy for a while.  And probably be rewatching a lot of DVDs while creating more stacks of enveloped books like the ones on the right.

Yay, it's a Dreadwing.  It's hard to believe we first saw the grayscale prototype for this guy at BotCon 2011, which was a while ago.  So long ago, the toy was gonna be Dreadwing's green brother Skyquake at that point in time.  But now we get Dreadwing (who's alive) first and Skyquake (who died in his first appearance) in a later wave.

This is my second "Robots in Disguise" Voyager!  I have First Editions of Starscream, Optimus Prime, and Bulkhead, so other than Megatron, the first few waves of Voyager Class product had been a wash.   (He's the first Prime Voyager I've bought in a store, come to think.)  And since Dreadwing is RID instead of FE, that means he comes with one of those big-ass unfolds-from-giant-block-into-weapon-with-electronic-lights things.  Megatron's similar deal only activated his sword; his giant cannon stayed as you'd like it while in default mode.  Dreadwing's, like everyone else's big weapon, does not.  The reason it doesn't stay in this unwrapped mode is because the weapon's LED lights up as it does so.  It's the gimmick.

And so I shoved a toothpick in there because I want Dreadwing's gun to look like the weapon he has on the show instead of a big mess of parts that's taller than it is long.  I wonder how long the battery will run.  (If you don't want to use a toothpick, you can prop the finger catch on the butt of the weapon into Dreadwing's chest as he holds the gun, as shown in the photo.  That'll cram the weapon in place while looking somewhat natural.)

Dreadwing also has a sword which can attach to the gun like a bayonette, also as seen on the cartoon.

The toy itself is complicated!  Not aggravatingly so, except for in one spot.  There are many series of kibble panels that form Dreadwing's robot mode, and as you get him towards jet mode, they all converge on a spot near the center of his fuselage, just behind the cockpit.  You have to order these strata just right.

He is, of course, a jet with a couple of giant robot legs hanging underneath him.

And let's not talk too much about the two robot hands grabbing out of the back near his thruster all goatse-like.

I am satisfied with him.  He looks like the character, has an interesting transformation (so many surface panels of the jet move around to seamlessly form pieces of him!), and he's a pretty cool jet if you don't look underneath him or from the side.  (If you collect Transformers, that's just kind of a given that you accept, so.)   It's too bad about that weapon.  I mean, I understand why.  It's for kids, and they like glowing.  Hell, I like glowing.  But fun-hating adults like myself may sometimes get cranky about it.

(Dreadwing is voiced by Tony Todd, who also voiced The Fallen, btw.)

So I ended up getting MP Thundercracker.  I wanted his stand, really, for Sunstorm (and I bought some Goo Be Gone on the same trip so I can remove "Thunder Cracker"'s misparsed name from it) and yesterday we stumbled across a buncha Thundercrackers, so.

His colors are nice.  I might like them better if I weren't having to compare them to Sunstorm's, whose colors are just an orange-shift away from Absolute Perfection.  He's a dark, deep blue, and I like his charcoaly forearms.  Also, man, he's got some goofy tampographs, which I adore.  The ones on top of his jet intakes that look like his original toy's stickers I don't really care for, but the rest are adorkable.  He's got Kyde's name on one side and... J. "Dragon" Sass's on the other...  And there's "Sonic Boom!" tampos on his tailfins and weird tattoos of Reflector on the backs of his shoulders, visible from the sides of his jet mode.   These goofy tampos make him slightly less boring.

It's obvious that Hasbro thought they were putting the original version of the mold in this package, given all of the call-outs.  It claims he has a swappable face, which is totes not true anymore, and he comes with the original version's jet mode missile pods, even though they're not exactly compatible with him anymore.  The instructions, of course, have the original version depicted as well, so that'll give somebody an ulcer, I'm sure.

I'll have to decide if I'm keeping him.  I want the stand, certainly, but I need some time to decide if I want to keep the robot.  If you want one of your own, he's Toys"R"Us exclusive, so keep a vigil for one there.  They'll go fast.

Who's got two thumbs and loves things that are horribly orange?  This guy!

Sunstorm's a little less orange than I'd prefer.  The original e-Hobby toy was orange creamsicle, a gloriously obnoxious shade not entirely possible in RGB photography, but Masterpiece Sunstorm runs a range from yellow to a yellowy orange.  The jet mode gradients between those two colors from nose to tail, and so when it transforms, you end up with a robot that's sort of yellow-orange with yellow boots.  The e-Hobby toy had a limited plastic breakdown, too, and so this more-complex toy tries to more accurately match the generic who appeared briefly in the cartoon, with white shoulder intakes, thighs, biceps, and fists.

As I said, not quite the orange I was hoping for.  However, it's still a friggin' stark-bright day-glow Playskool fighter jet, and that still touches me in all the right places.

Which is why I was happy to sell my MP Starscream to better afford buying this guy.  Yes, I liked Starscream because he was a more realistic desaturated hue, skewing towards realism, and the many alterations to the mold emphasizes animation-model accuracy over jet mode realism, but orange always trumps realism for me.  Now you know my hierarchy.

Included in the cosmetic mold alterations is a new head.  The old one was kind of narrow, partly because it had to fit through a narrow gap in the fuselage during transformation, but the new one is wider.  The vents on the side of his head compress into the sides of his helmet so you can still squeeze the head through.  I like the new head better, so that works out for me.

Since the retooled version of this toy was released as a "Coronation Starscream," Sunstorm comes with those parts as well, even though Sunstorm hasn't ever worn a crown, shoulder pads, and a cape.  Maybe it's his formal wear.  He does think he's a god, after all, what with the accident-of-birth radiation powers, so I guess it's not a stretch that he'd dress the part.

Though the Masterpiece toy's orange is inferior to the original toy's, the articulation helps fill the gap for me.  Because of Sunstorm's well-articulated hands and arms and his balljointed neck, he can assume poses that aren't limited to "raise arms."  He can stretch out his arms and open his palms, as if he believes he's controlling the cosmos.  He can look up into the heavens.  In short, he can have personality.

One real disappointment is that he doesn't have the stand that the first MP Starscream did.  I kinda wanna do floating-in-the-air poses.  I guess maybe I could buy a MP Thundercracker at Toys"R"Us to get one?  Though that'd be a $70 stand with somebody else's name tampographed on it.  Gnngh.

(Hey, during which iteration of this mold was the Dr. Arkeville pilot figurine replaced with the pilot pilot figurine?)

Finally, this toy came with a limited Sunstorm collectible coin.

Not sure what I'm gonna do with that, but I ain't gonna turn it down.

So, uh, hey, looks like e-Hobby is doing Shattered Glass stuff!  SG Soundwave (redeco of original Soundwave instead of being an SUV) with SG Batbot (Ratbat) and Slugfest versus SG Blaster with SG Rewind, Eject, and Ramhorn.

Batbot's the only guy in which I've had a personal hand in creating the character, so it's kind of surreal to see if he's gonna get a toy.  But I'd also be happy to get Slugfest and Blaster (who've made appearances outside Recordicons) and Eject, Ramhorn, and Rewind, who are new.

But seriously.  Potential  Batbot toy.

ahahahahaha

 

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So, you may be asking yourself, hey, webcartoonist guy, why would you buy a Reprolabels set that mostly enhances a fire truck that a) is a bitch to get the toy into and b) results in a winceworthy sea of unaligned panels when you make the attempt?  Because I'm insane, that's why.  And because in theory I like big accurate fire trucks that happen to transform into robots.  And I really like that field of stripes that's now on the rear.

This thing had probably fifteen billion stickers, half of which were tiny millimeter-wide lights.  It took me a while.

But I like it.

Here's the Sentinel Prime toy unstickered, photographed way back.

Whee, my Aquagirl/Static/Micron set arrived in the mail today!  Not only are there no Batmen or Supermen in this three-pack, but there are, amazingly, absolutely no white dudes in it.  This is actually a set of two black guys and the Little Mermaid.  Obama's America, folks.

The big draw here, obviously, is Future Static.  Seriously, eff yeah, man.

Aquagirl would be a closer second if she didn't look weird or have unpainted sculpted Justice Lord Wonder Woman high heels because she's supposed to be barefoot.  She's a great companion to Hawkgirl and her flesh belt.  I have a rubber band wrapped around her ankles because her legs came all warped.

Micron's okay.

This leaves us with only Green Lantern and Future Barda as the only members without toys.  S'too bad.  Green Lantern would be an entirely new sculpt, though, so I can see why he was avoided.  Barda... is probably a just new head on the standard female body?  But since this is the Last Of The Last of JLU, they obviously ain't happening.