In addition to my Hot Shot and Knock Out, there was a lone Vehicon in the box from Big Bad Toy Store.  I only ordered the set of three, figuring I'd buy a second one whenever I found one at retail.  And that day has come!

I wanted more than one because, if you don't follow the show, Vehicons are the generic Decepticon troopers.  They are infinite.  Two of them are good for me.  I'd usually say three, but there are also jet-style Vehicons which are coming out later, and with two of each kind, that's a good enough-sized army for me.



This is the second Vehicon toy.  There was also a Vehicon in the "First Edition" assortment, and boy am I glad those never made it out over here!  Seriously, I am.  Because I'd own a bunch.  And you know what?  Those First Edition ones are crap.  They've got Kibble Backpack like they're going camping.  It's not an elegant-looking toy.

"Robots in Disguise" Vehicon, in comparison, is friggin' magic.  For reals.  Folks were starting at photos of Vehicon v2.0 wondering where the hell all its vehicle parts go.  They vanished!  What happened, is there a car roof shield he holds or something?  Pyche naw.  He instead defies the laws of physics.  Nearly all of his vehicle mode -- hood, roof, and all, folds up delicately and compacts inside his shins.  This should not work, and yet it does.  And so Vehicon is virtually kibble-free except the parts that are actually supposed to be there according to the character model.  It's insane.

It's not a perfect toy.  His biceps are... weird.  There's some awkward hinging there.  But the glory of his car-to-leg-stuffing transformation kind of blinds you to that.

He comes with a gun.  It can peg into any of his holes (hur hur) or it can clip onto various mounting points.  If you fold his wrist down and clip the gun there, it sort of looks like how his guns look like on the show.  Like most of the show characters, he doesn't have handheld weaponry, opting instead for a forearm that transforms into a gun.

Buy all the ones you can find.

I got Knock Out (and Vehicon) in the same box from Big Bad Toy Store that had Hot Shot in it, but I only asked Maggie to bring me Hot Shot to the airport for BotCon.  Knock Out awaited me when I returned!  I mean, I like Knock Out, but I don't have a shrine of him.  (It'd be a pretty small shrine at this point anyway, with only his Deluxe and his Happy Meal toy.)

Knock Out, much like SG Tracks, is evil Tracks.  He's more concerned about his paint job than anything else, and the only difference between him and heroic Tracks is that if you scuff him up, he'll take a saw to you.  Much of Transformers fandom -- and expecially Tumblr -- has decided he's gay.  If you want to see some hot Knock Out action, or at least some mild cuddling, search for art of him.  I guarantee you he has a much higher percentage of slash than any other Transformers Prime character.  (Starscream is probably second.)  In fact, if you read nothing on the Internet about Transformers except what's on Tumblr, you'd probably come away with the idea that Knock Out is The Most Popular Transformers Character Of All Time (And Also Has A Thing With Breakdown).

Given his popularity, of course everyone was excited for a toy of him.  We got to see an early, unpainted version of his toy at 2011's BotCon, to much cheering, but once we saw him in color, folks seemed put off.  On the show, he has a pretty high contrast red/yellow/white color scheme, while the toy focused instead on the car's two-toned red deco, leaving most of the yellow accents off.  Knock Out is "that red and yellow car" according to probably most folks, but the toy was decided only red and gray.  The toy does have some gold trim on the hood, but that's the extent of non-red colors.

There's also the matter of the show model being able to thwart all laws of physics and hide nearly all of his car parts and replace them with robot parts.  The toy of course can't do that, so instead of having normal robotty forearms, Knock Out's forearms are the car's rooftops, and instead of having a big robotty abdomen, his abdomen is car hood.  Plus none of the official photos (and many of the in-hand photos by fans) seemed to have trouble photographing his torso transformed properly.  Those car hood halves can angle towards each other so they nearly connect in the middle, y'know.  And so folks were all "bleaaugh."

(Except the folks on Tumblr.  They seem perfectly pleased.  I swear, the difference between the Transformers fandom on Tumblr and on everywhere else is like night and day.)

The toy itself, in all practicality, is fine.  It transforms easily enough, and with enough unique twists and turns that it doesn't feel like one of the 30 million other Transformers cars I already have.  The face has the appropriate smirk, giving the toy some personality. And so I was pleased with it!  It's Knock Out, as a non-terrible toy, which may require some painting.  Which I am perfectly capable of doing, so hey.  I didn't attack it as thoroughly as Cheetimus did, but I know the limits of my skill and I stick within them.

So if you like Knock Out, I recommend him.  If you like Knock Out and have a silver Sharpie marker, all the better.

Folk who bought Joyce & Walky! subscription-only comics (available in the store), there are now more comics!  I have drawn some more and put them up on the final page.  If you've got 'em, refresh 'em!

I got the inspiration and drive to draw more J&W! strips shortly after committing to drawing this week's Shortpacked! storyline.  ...so, with Dumbing of Age, I've been doing three comic strips with three separate storylines every day all week, with competing versions of the same characters all over the place.  I don't know how my brain manages it.  There's got to be some leakage somewhere, I'm sure.

So this is prooobably not sustainable, but I thought you folks who bought the pages would appreciate the heads-up regardless.

See? A rut. First Octopunch, then SG Prime, and now these guys.  I left them all for last, and now this feels like a big hate parade.

I feel about the Shattered Glass Junkions the same way I did about Shattered Glass on its debut year.  I wanted to add to my existing armies and not start new ones.  I was really excited when we found out about Hasbro making Junkions.  Junkions with three heads, even!  That was guaranteed a souvenir set of some sort.  And it meant I could double the number of Junkions from three to six.  Maybe we'd even get a new head or something, who knows.

But naw dawg, have some mirrorverse Junkions.

Mirrorverse Junkions who borged a bunch of guys I like into more mirrorverse Junkions.

It just wasn't what I wanted from these molds at BotCon.

At least they're attractive.

Man, I'm kind of annoyed with myself that I somehow saved the BotCon toys I like the least for last. I was on a pretty good roll of "Woo"s and "Yay"s, and now we're in this rut where it feels like I hate everything. That's not true! It's just that we're to the stuff I didn't want to talk about immediately.

Shattered Glass Ultra Magnus I'm not unkeen on.  He's a new character!  And he uses the mold's second head that Hasbro hadn't used yet.  It's a translucent skull, because, yo, bad ass.  Reportedly this is an "evil Optimus Prime" noggin that Hasbro would have attached to their eventual Nemesis Prime use of the mold.  It's a pretty villainous head, so it works well for SG Ultra Magnus.  The Diaclone Powered Convoy colors work well here, too.  Red and blue are usually heroic colors, but with their specific hues and with all the black and gray, it comes off as evil enough.

My only complaint is the relative tininess of the toy.  He's plumped up in the comic, because his opposite number is Treadshot, the huge Deluxe Jazz mold.  It feels  uneven.  The smallness is something I complained about with the original use of the mold, and it's relevant with Magnus, too.  But not as relevant as it is with BotCon's other use of this mold.

Geez, Shattered Glass Optimus Prime!  I dunno what BotCon's historical fascination is with upgrading their guys as less impressive toys, but yikes.  SG Prime used to be a Voyager.  A good Voyager!  One of my reluctant favorites of the 2008 set.  He was the centerpiece of my Shattered Glass Autobot shelf.  When I eventually put this new version of him in his old toy's place, you wouldn't even be able to see him.  Bumblebee can see over the top of his head.  It's just not a great upgrade.

Size aside, the toy is decoed marvelously.  There's paint washes everywhere.  But I'd rather his new toy had the presence of the old toy.

Now, Optimus Prime only appeared in the comic as a head on a screen, so my brain hasn't really registered yet that he's this body now.  So I'm probably good to keep the old one on the shelf until he eventually appears in a future story and reminds me.  Let's hope that's a long way off.

I think I'd had a preorder on Big Bad Toy Store for "Nintendo 2-4inch Figure Collector Case with Bowser Figure" for roughly three years. Maybe more, I dunno. There was never a picture of it on the site, nor one that I could find online.  And every month the expected arrival date would be pushed forward.  But I held on to hope, you know?  My collection of Super Mario mini-figurines reeeeeeeeeeally needed a Bowser.  Yeah, I had double Paragoombas and double Koopa Troopas and such, but these were tiny guys, up against the much larger Mario, Luigi, and their frankly insane number of Yoshis.  Pitted against each other, you feel really sorry for the bad guys, and that's not what bad guys are for!

No, they needed a huge centerpiece, a center of power.  But as far as I could tell, the line was likely dead.  There'd been no sign of the fourth wave or even the "Figure Collector Case with Bowser" that I'd had on preorder since the beginning of time.  Newer Mario figures had begun to show up, but this was a newer, smaller scale.  A Bowser in a box-set had shown up in this scale, but, man, it would be a pointless Bowser.  A pointless, tiny Bowser that would fulfill none of my collection's requirements other than it being a Bowser.  Bowser needs to be appropriately huge.  Mario shouldn't be able to look over the top of his head.  You shouldn't feel sorry for him as he's about to be beaten up soundly by the legions of pastel Yoshis.  Princess Toadstool shouldn't look like she weighs more than him.  And so I passed, and have continued to pass on him for probably many years.

So Wednesday Graham and I were out looking for Prime Wave 3 but stumbled upon this.  There was just one giant carded Bowser sitting on the shelf next to the rest of the Mario/Sonic/whatevers in a Toys"R"Us.  There was no sign of the rest of a new wave or of other Bowsers.  Just a single giant carded Bowser, waiting for me, as if an angel had placed him there for me to find.

First I wondered what the hell was wrong with it that it hadn't sold.  I mean, this was what everyone in the universe should by all rights desire. It's like finding Allison Mack sitting there on the shelf, untouched.  Was this Allison Mack secretly a dude?  There was a pockmark in the shoulder, and the snout looked a little incohesive, but it was by all rights exactly what I had waited for for half a decade and had basically given up all reasonable hope for.  That thing was coming home with me.

It was $15.  When I got home, I canceled my preorder.  I also checked online to see if this Bowser was something that existed elsewhere in the world other than in my mind.  And it does.  So, phew.

We got a Shattered Glass Jazz years before we got a "Classics" Jazz, but I was pretty fine with that.  We were bound to get a "real" Jazz eventually, and we did!  And now we'll get a new Jazz every year until the end of time.  But this Shattered Glass Octopunch business, I just dunno.   I don't expect many Octopunches.

It'd be forgiven if SG Octopunch were a neat character.  No, his stated personality on his profile card is that he has no personality.  He's average, boring, a regular joe.  He pointedly has no amusing quirks.  I imagine that's partly because there's isn't much personality in the original Octopunch to mirror.  His appeal has always been that he's a crazy tentacled diver monster, like something out of Scooby Doo.   (His mirrored self obviously should have been a guy who drives around in Soundwave with Ravage and solves mysteries.)

(He'd be very big on traps.)

Seriously, if this guy were the real Octopunch and I got to see him in the comic in action as the real Octopunch, he would have been my favorite toy of the set.  As-is, I'll still enjoy him, but it will be a dulled enjoyment, mostly because I have both an SG and a Classics display, and it's pretty obvious between the two where this guy goes!  If/when I put my SG stuff away, then Octopunch can go hang out with my Bludgeon.

Begrudgingly.

Knowing all the while that it's just my stupid fanon.

But it is a good toy!  A very pretty toy.  Again, wacky late Eighties colors like Spinister, with the teals and purples.  I like the mold better as (an) Octopunch than I did as Sea Spray, from whom this toy was redecoed.  And he doesn't have a new head, but the paint job done on his noggin makes the idea of a new head redundant.  With the oxygen tubes around his chin painted blue, that makes his head look more like a separate, dome-shaped piece, akin to the original.  And you can give him Terradive/SpaceCase's trident if your Octopunch needs a trident.  (The original Octopunch toy didn't have one either.  It was made up for the comic.)

The only part of the deco that I wish were different were the seafoam chest and upper arms.  Octopunch in the comics was colored unlike the toy, with a solid yellow torso and upper arms.  With yellow instead of seafoam, he would have been absolutely glorious.

But then, SG Octopunch isn't supposed to be absolutely glorious.  He's supposed to be forgettable and average.  So.

Good choice, I guess.

And back to our regularly-scheduled BotCon stuff.

One of my most anticipated toys in the set this year was Metalhawk.  Now, I don't know Metalhawk from a hole in the ground.  He was a Japanese-only Pretender in a show I've barely watched.   But goddamn do I love myself some Pretender references.  Sure, we've gotten a handful recently, between Skullgrin and Thunderwing and Bludgeon, but those were remakes of the monster-type Pretenders.  Half the Pretenders were human!  I crave a new human Pretender toy.

And so Metalhawk was my ticket to happytown.  Human face!  For reals!  None of that post-modern "let's redesign the fleshy Pretender shells to look more like robots" crap.  He's just straight-up a dude in armor, as things should be.  The natural order.

Plus Metalhawk was the only human Pretender that wasn't a white dude, so that's neat.  Finally my Pretender collection has a little racial diversity!

And now that Metalhawk is a transforming Pretender shell, that means he's a Mega Pretender rather than the usual kind.  That puts him in the ranks of Vroom, Crossblades, and, yeah, Thunderwing.  Him being a transforming human guy is even more geeky.

Metalhawk is a retool of Thunderwing.  He has a new head, obviously.  The mold works pretty well as Metalhawk's Pretender shell body!  The red, white, and blues make him look heroic enough, despite his claws and pointy toes.  I do wish they'd painted the mohawk on his helmet red, though.

Hey, let's take a break from BotCon stuff!  I got other guys that weekend, after all!

This is Transformers Prime Hot Shot!  I enjoy him very much.  In a world where Bumblebee is Optimus Prime's trusted yellow hot rodded sportscar and Hot Rod has taken back the "hot headed youth destined to be leader" job, I'm happy to see there's still a place for Hot Shot nestled somewhere in between.  Sure, he kinda has to be his blue-and-red-then-yellow Cybertron colors so he's not exactly Bumblebee, but I understand that this is the compromise between him existing and him not existing.

Prime  Hot Shot is a retool of the second Bumblebee Deluxe toy.  I only have the first Bumblebee Deluxe toy, and so this mold was a new one to me.  This version transforms a lot more simply than the first one, which is good for fun but not as good for show-accuracy.  But this is Hot Shot, who's not on the show (yet?), so it doesn't matter that he's not screen accurate to a screen version that may or may not exist.  So I can bask in the fun of him.

His entire torso is geared to autotransform, you see.  If you pull his shoulders/front wheels outwards from the hood, this incredible thing takes place where the torso and head orchestrates itself wildly into position.  It's kind of amazing.  Everything else is kind of an easy afterthought.  Pull out the legs, fold up the roof, the end.

Like the original Hot Shot, this guy has a visor that flips down!  This really makes him feel like Hot Shot to me.  Unlike the original Hot Shot, the visor is translucent plastic painted mostly black, leaving unpainted goggle lenses, which is an improvement over the original opaque piece.  Also unlike the original Hot Shot, his head can turn at the neck.  He's pretty poseable overall for a Hot Shot!

One thing I have trouble grasping visually are his eyes.  See those horizontal silver slabs?  Those are actually his eyebrows!  Below them are his eyes, and they're blue translucent plastic, same as his windows and the unpainted portions of his visor.  But you can't really see them very well when they're buried inside the middle of his blue face.  They're lightpiped, but the big plastic piece behind his head tends to block light from going through there.  Maybe at some point I'll paint his eyebrows black to help my brain read his face properly.

(I've never actually customized any of my Hot Shots.  This would be a first.  I might get a double, just to have a pristine specimen to match the rest of my Shrine.)

This toy comes with a fun story!  I had this guy (and the rest of his case) preordered from Big Bad Toy Store, and they were due to arrive from UPS the day I left for BotCon.  Well, dammit, I knew that the truck wouldn't arrive until I got to the airport.  And sure enough, I was right.  No sooner than I'd been dropped off by my wife and gotten checked in than I got a phone call from her telling me the UPS guy got there with my Hot Shot as she was pulling up to our place.  And because my wife is the best friggin' wife in the whole damn world, she grabbed the Hot Shot for me, drove back to the airport, and handed him over to me on the curb.  (We live one exit down the highway.)  Hot Shot got to be my trip buddy!

One of the security guys asked if it was collectible and if I was gonna keep it sealed.  He was really sad when I told him that he was gonna be opened as soon as I got to my gate.

And then licked.

Spinister was one of the at-show surprises, and the one at-show guy other than Kick-Off who wasn't a Shattered Glass mirrorverse guy.  He's a redeco of the Tomahawk mold, which I hadn't owned a toy of yet.  Back when Tomahawk hit stores, I figured eventually he'd be some guy I liked better, probably in a BotCon set, and I was right!  Huzzah.  Spinister uses the mold's alternate head, which until now had only been used in Japan.

He feels really close to a perfect Spinister toy.  Fun Publications obviously tried to go for a more accurate helicopter mode, colorwise, leaving us a robot mode with flipped colors.  Y'know, with pink legs instead of a pink torso.  I dunno if that's how I woulda gone.  Sure, the other way would have resulted in a pink helicopter, but if anything's gonna be a venue for a pink helicopter Transformer, it's gonna be BotCon.

That said, the colors ARE very nice, and not what we'd expect at retail.  His pink, teal, and blue screams 1988 all over.  Open up the Decepticon side of the 1988 Transformers catalog, and this guy's colors are what you'll see everywhere.

The toy itself, since I hadn't owned a version before, is pretty standard.  In vehicle mode his legs are obviously kinda hanging underneath the whole helicopter deal, especially now that they're bright pink.  He's got some missile launchers and some c-clips to attach other weapons to.

I kinda want this toy redecoed as Rotorstorm.  Probably wanna use the other head, though.