Well, you can have mine.  Masterpiece Sunstorm's imminent, and I don't really need two of this mold, and given the choice, I'd keep Sunstorm.  Orange always wins with me.  So check out eBay if you're interested.

Since Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's Batman is like the greatest thing ever, I've been hankering for a toy of Batman's "new 52" design.  Yeah, the one with all the extra lines.  But the DC Direct version sure wasn't gonna be it.  That thing is a lean Jim Lee statuette.  I wanted something a little closer to Greg Capullo's slightly more stocky take on Batman.  ...And probably something that has more than a handful of very shallow points of articulation.

And so I snagged myself Mattel's version.  It is much nicer in nearly every single way than the DC Direct one would have been, though it's in no way a perfect Batman toy.  My old "perfect" Batman six inch figure, the one from Public Enemies (seen being punched above), still has some advantages over it.  Namely... man, I know I am biased towards the cartoonish, but I still feel strongly that superheroes are way pinheaded most of the time, and it rubs me the wrong way.  And so Mattel's New 52 Batman's tiny head looks a little hilarious.  I thought maybe I could swap heads between the two, but after pulling on either head for a little bit, I was too apprehensive of breaking something, and so I let them be.

I just want a large cartoonish jaw, is that so wrong?  Also, I'm a big fan of the pouch-style belt versus the new belt-belt, but whatevs.   And I do wish there were a toy that were more faithful to Greg Capullo's art style.  I'd squee.

Anyway, where the hell are my Court of Owls toys?

I'm a toy collector, but Scooby Doo merchandise isn't exactly my area of expertise, you know?  But I learned there were Scooby Doo toys with sculpts based on the Mystery Inc iteration of the franchise, with its Derrick Wyatt-y goodness, and I decided I must have  a Velma.   There are lots of Scooby Doo five-pack box sets of the principle characters, but the small pictures on eBay make it hard to discern the sculpts I want from the "classic" sculpts which have been around a lot longer.  (Also, it makes it harder to tell if their paint is good.)  It's not like you can just look for the box with "Mystery Inc" on the front.  No, they're all still in "classic" Scooby packaging.  Kinda  a stealth release, I'm guessing.  But I narrowed one down, rolled the dice, and eventually got one in the mail.

Now, while the sculpts themselves are Mystery Inc based, the paint jobs definitely ain't!  Usually this is fine.  But the eyes!  Lord no.  These are not Mystery Inc Velma's eyes.  They are original Velma's eyes, tampographed onto the new design.  THIS IS INTOLERABLE.

So I fix.  With paint.

The problem is shared among the other toys.  Derrick Wyatt doesn't include the whites of the eyes in his Scooby Doo Mystery Inc character models, but they're all painted otherwise in the set.  But I really only care about Velma, so, meh.  Dunno if I'll fix the others.   It'd take more work than is desirable to scrub the eyes off Fred just to repaint them.  And I haven't even removed anyone else from the box yet.  But we'll see.

(I also went over Velma's hair with my own brown because some of the paint was uneven and I didn't like seeing the skin-colored plastic poking through.  It looks kind of uneven in the photograph, but in person it's much more lovely.)

Raphael is my favorite Ninja Turtle.  Sort of.  Raphael was my favorite Ninja Turtle from the cartoon of my youth, but that rendition of Raphael is an aberration.  In the original comics (and thus everything else besides the original cartoon) Raphael was the dark angsty rebellious one.  (Basically Wolverine.)  And so I'm generally SOL on new Turtles stuff since the part I liked the best isn't ever repeated.

The part I liked second best?  Krang.  Whoops.

Look, the nine-year-old in me just wants the red guy to be the cheerful dumb-wordplay spouter.  His job is to be funny and not in a "he's kind of touched in the head" sort of way Mikey is.  His job is to be Yakko Warner, but as a fork-carrying anthropomorphic turtle.

(Apparently being Yakko is Donatello's new job.)

And so I picked up the "Classics" Raphael from Laughing Ogre yesterday.  He's kind of massive.  See, he's a six-inch toy, but not six-inch scale, where one inch generally represents one foot.   This is too bad, because this means he can't hang out with anybody but his brothers, who I sure hope I don't end up buying.   He sees eye-to-eye with Batman, and that's just wrong.  But I understand.  At proper six-inch scale, you couldn't get nearly all the joints they've packed into this guy.  (He'd basically be the size of a G.I. Joe, and I don't think those have individually-articulated toes and universal-joint thumbs.)

Yeah, all his digits are articulated, and his thumbs additionally so.  He's got some wrist articulation,  his elbows and knees are double-jointed so they can bend more realistically, and he's got balljointed mid-torso joint as well.  Not many Ninja Turtle toys can turn at the waist.  The only thing I really found lacking was how shallow his neck articulation is.  With all of this limb range, it would really help if his head could look up.  It kind of makes the whole exercise a little futile.

He comes with a sewer grate with his name tampographed on it and a few footpegs.  This is nice because he's a little backheavy FOR SOME REASON, and his many many joints don't always support him well, and so the stand aids stability a bit.  His hands grip his sais well despite his finger articulation, plus the sais can store in his belt.  I do kind of wish he had a swappable head or a different expression.  The classic Ninja Turtle 8-shaped grimace isn't really how I picture happy-snarky 80s toon Raphael.  But I understand it.

Of course, if Playmates ever wants to expand their Classics toys to other characters, due to the 6-inch thing, Shredder would be a pretty damn huge toy.  I would buy it, but it would be huge.

I would also buy any Krang.

It looked like the Jet-style Vehicon was gonna be a Japan-only release as well, so I jumped on BigBadToyStore's preorders a few weeks back.  The wings add about a third again to Jet Vehicon's mass, so if it does eventually show up over here, it'll probably hafta go in a case assortment with somebody a little smaller to compensate.

Jet Vehicon is Car Vehicon's robot mode with an entire new vehicle shell.  Yeah, it looks like it's just a car with wings, but it's not Car Vehicon's car with wings.  It's an entirely different car with wings, and one that matches the show's model exactly.  I am super in love with Jet Vehicon's altmode.  This may be because as a child I had a fascination with cars with wings (versus jets), a fascination which you may have noticed manifesting itself in this webcomic.  Or maybe it's just that it objectively looks super cool.

For the love of god, while getting him into robot mode, transform his wings first.  If you don't, you'll have to transform everything back so you can get to the wings properly.  There's no clearance to flip them up otherwise.  As one would suspect, other than the wings, Jet Vehicon's transformation is exactly the same as Car Vehicon's.  He's just reshelled, after all.  And so he has the same amazing everything-fits-into-his-legs transformation and the wonky elbows.  The former is great, the latter is not so great.

If the toy has any disadvantages over its predecessor, it's that the shell of the jet mode is harder to peg together when putting him back in vehicle form.  Closing him up again can be a little annoying.

As with the other Japanese Transformers Prime toys, Jet Vehicon comes with a little Mini-Con dude you put together.  This one transforms from a Vehicon blaster into ...an iguana, I think.  Ah, yeah, his name is Igu.  Well, that settles it.  (Then again, Iguanus never transformed into an iguana.)  Now that I've gotten four of these Mini-Cons, I can see the appeal of pegging them together to make larger weapons, as intended.  Right now my Breakdown's holding a giant double-barreled drill cannon that's half his own mass.

I wanted two of each of the two kinds of Vehicons, and now I have them, so I consider myself done with Vehicons.  Until they come out with more different kinds, I guess.  I feel four total is a manageably-sized army.

I guess I should talk about "Rust In Peace Cliffjumper," another of SDCC's Transformers exclusives.  RIP Cliffjumper (seen on the right) is a toy of when Cliffjumper was a Dark Energon zombie, so of course I was interested in it.  Because, you know, Transformer zombie.  (Zombies actually have a pretty storied history in Transformers, but we don't get many toys of them.)

RIP Cliffjumper is a retool of the "First Edition" Cliffjumper, which didn't get sold here in America as planned (but it will later this year).   I've been told by everyone who got one that it was amazingly awesome, so maybe that put my expectations a little high, but I was kind of disappointed in the toy.  While the Cliffjumper we got was pretty simple (if full of fake kibble), FE Cliffjumper's mold can be pretty frustrating to me.  Getting him into car mode was a chore.  Not fun.  I mean, it's nice that all his car parts actually become the correct corresponding robot parts, but he kind of cheesed me off.

On the other hand, zombie.  So even if this toy was the devil, he's still better than the more-fun-to-transform non-zombie one.

And  he came inside a package that looked like his own head, and the head-package comes inside a box that looks like his chest.  He's a Cliffjumper turducken.

Apparently it's National Same Sex Kiss Day or something.  So have some art I drew for my wife the other day of Velma makin' out with Hot Dog Water.  You know, from Scooby Doo Mystery Inc, which is the best Scooby Doo show ever.  I know, that's not a bold claim, but it's seriously perfect, and Maggie and I drop everything to watch it.

We ship them.  We ship them hard.

Now, technically these Same Sex Kisses are supposed to be happening in a Chick-Fil-A, but just pretend the art takes place outside one at like midnight or something.  Or maybe they broke in to search for clues... and love.

Actually,  you know what?  Screw it, let's do this right.

MattyCollector's started putting the last few remaining JLU three-packs up in their store!  Y'know, the ones that were gonna be at retail, but Young Justice toys kind of swooped in and took their spot on the pegs, and also nobody was buying JLU anyway, and then nobody bought Young Justice either.  And so you're gonna be paying online exclusive markup for them, but I find that preferable to the alternative of NOT GETTING VANDAL SAVAGE OH MY GOD GIVE HIM TO ME.

The first set released was Batman/Mongul/Wonder Woman.  Obviously, you're buying this one for Mongul.  At least he's a 100% new sculpt to make up for the repeat WW/Batman guys.  (Again, these were supposed to be at retail, which is why those two are in there.)  The JLU new sculpts are always fantastic, and Mongul is no exception.  These toys really shine when they're sharp and individualized rather than being a decades-old Superman body with a new head.  And so Mongul's great.  And sufficiently huge.

I can't say all that much about Mongul himself.  He was in a really boring episode about a gladiator pit planet, and I tend to skip over that one a lot when I watch through my JLU DVDs.  No, Mongul got lucky by being written into Alan Moore's "For the Man Who Has Everything," which everyone loves and was then made into an episode of the JLU cartoon.  And I feel a little off by saying that, yeah, that episode is why Mongul is awesome, when really it could have been anygoddamnedbody in his role in that story and nothing would have changed.  Well, any of the 30 different outer space dictator dudes the Justice League fights, anyway.  Jervis Tetch (aka the Mad Hatter) pulled off a similar scheme in "Perchance to Dream," but I doubt he could have held off Wonder Woman.

I'm just saying, there's not a lot to Mongul.  He's the guy you go to when Darkseid and Despero are busy.

UPDATE: Decided to watch rewatch Mongul's episodes, and I hadn't noticed before that he had a character model tweak, probably because "War World" parts 1 and 2 put me to sleep.  When he shows up again in "For the Man Who Has Everything," he's a darker purple, some of his silver has been changed to black, and his hat is now purple.  He's also drawn a whole lot better, but that may have just been the animation studio.  Anyway, the toy is of his appearance from the Good Episode.  Surprise!

Goddammit, I hate when I can't find a vintage toy to photograph alongside my updated version.  I know my Swerve is SOMEWHERE.

So Asia got these exclusive Transformers and we're getting them later as exclusives blah blah blah, and Swerve was one of them.  I want more than him, but he was what I was able to order, which turned out okay, since I'll be able to get the rest for domestic retail price anyway.  I'm only paying import prices for Swerve.  That news of them coming stateside came just in time.  (I got mine from TFSource, btw, which is one of the big sponsors of TFWiki.)

Long, long ago, Swerve was a truck.  Then he was a car, then another car, and then even more cars. This is the first truck he's been since the original, unless I'm having a brain fart.  He's Generations Kup with a new head, the alternate one featured in Kup's instructions.  And he's, y'know, in Swerve colors.

He's not nearly as awesome as my Kup, not gonna lie.  First of all, Kup has always been one of my favorite characters and his toy here has been on my desk for a year because I love it that much; second, mine has a cigar 'cuz of that third party head I got; and third, he's a glorious combination of brilliantly saturated teals since he's the e-Hobby release.  Swerve's combination of red, white, black, and light gray is very attractive, but it's not friggin' teal, y'know?  Teal is the friggin' bomb.  Swerve's use of this mold isn't bad, not by a long shot, he's just not the best use of this mold.  That'd be hard anyway, so I don't hold it against him.

The weird thing about Asian Swerve (and the rest of his Asian-exclusive toyline) is that while his packaging is completely English... the domestic-release ones displayed at Comic-Con had Chinese all over them.  I guess maybe they think kids will think that's neat?  Maybe!  I really have no idea.

I have no idea how a "staction figure" with nothing but neck articulation and nothing to do with it other than a swappable set of legs inspired so many photos.  But since there's no way I can write enough paragraphs about Zuul to be comfortably able to couch a half dozen photos, here's a simple gallery.

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