Hey, Shortpacked! Book 4 is now available for purchase in the store!

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I got my JLU 7-pack in the mail today, signifying the end of that toyline.  Which means it’s time to finally take stock of all of the duplicate Batmen, Supermen, and whoevers that I amassed in the past decade in the quest to get dudes they were packed with.

When I am done, I plan to just sell them all on eBay for probably five dollars. In the meantime, some preliminary photography.  For example:

1) Man, I am surprised I can only find one extra Martian Manhunter.  Clearly I must have more somewhere!  Did I really only ever end up with just one extra of him?  It seems impossible.

2) My original bin of extras was packed in SUPER TIGHT.  Like, creating-diamonds-out-of-coal-tight.  Related to this tidbit is an observation on how soft and goopy Giganta’s dress is.  Whoops.

2a) (Not entirely limited to Giganta’s dress.  I had one Superman’s cape embedded in the neck of another.)

3) Woo, “I can breathe in space” Batman!

4) Woo, “Atmosphere-destroying missile” Superman!

5) A sweet ass Scuba Flash.  I have a whole team of scuba guys, probably came with an Aquaman, but Flash is the sharpest of those.

There's a chance there might be more JLU stuff, but only because some of their 3-packs (*coughcoughcoughVandalSavagecoughcough*) never made it to retail and Matty's hinted at maybe offering those online maybe.  Maybe.

But meh.  It happens, it happens.  Stick a fork in this toyline.

LET HE WHO IS WITHOUT IMPULSE-BUY-WEAKNESS CAST THE FIRST STONE.

Look!  You can't judge me!  Why?  THE BIBLE.  Sure, okay, most scholars doubt that passage's authenticity, but BIBLICAL dammit BIBLICAL.

Anyway, this is "First Edition" Bumblebee.  He's starting to show up at Toys"R"Uses.  Arcee and Starscream are also showing up there, but they tend to get grabbed up before you arrive.  This is the version of this Bumblebee mold that's not a taxi.  And, man, does he make the taxi version look orange!

He also makes the taxi version look kind of devoid of paint, relatively.  It's weird.  You'd expect the exclusive version, the version they can charge anything for, to have more.  Yet counter to my expectations, the retail version seems covered in more paint operations.  Lots of small things I would have to otherwise paint myself, were I to attempt show-accuracy, are already done for me, like the swabs of black on his hips and gray on his crotch.

(Though it looks like I may have to add some silver to his inside ankles.  Silver Sharpie here we come!  Matching the gunmetal gray for his wrists may be tougher.)

Speaking of matching colors, the gunmetal gray on both versions of Bumblebee seems identical to me.  That means you can steal Taxibee's weapon with impunity!  "First Edition" Bumblebee can now rock guns on both his forearms just like in the cartoon.

All of the "First Edition" guys come with cardboard stands which are fit into the bottom of the packaging.  I will not be using these.  Nice thought, though.

If you're in or near Columbus, Ohio, and want to go grab a copy of Shortpacked! Book 4, there are some copies at The Laughing Ogre.  I'm still in the middle of mailing out the preorders, and when I work through a bigger chunk of those, I'll put Book 4 up in the store.  But in the meantime, if you're local, you've got an advantage.

Out today was the comic book store edition of BotCon 2011's Transformers Animated adventure.  Be sure to hit up your local comic book store for that!  In addition to like 16 extra pages of content, there's photos of my Animated Minerva toy and ... okay, a half-page ad for Shortpacked!.  There's nothing new there on that front, really.  Just figgered I'd mention it.  But the story itself is fantastic and amazingly-rendered, and I recommend it.

Early this evening, a freight truck dropped off a pallet of Shortpacked! Book 4.  Hooray!  My buddy Steve helped me carry, box by box, the 1500 pounds of books down into my basement, and now they are finally here for me to start mailing them to those who funded the Kickstarter project.  After I rest.  Oh my lord, rest.  Rest and Arkham City.

Mostly Arkham City.

I have a dummy page for Book 4 in the Store, but I won't open that up to actual orders until I get through a chunk of the preorders.  I already have hundreds of books I have to mail out, and I don't need to add to my mailing pile just  yet.    I will keep you posted when that status changes!

I have not yet checked any of the boxes for parts of blenders.  Hell, they could all be blenders.

There's two new Shortpacked!-themed t-shirts in the store (in that they're about caped avengers and alien robots, respectively) and one new Dumbing of Age tee.

The first one, "Lupus Luna Trion," is something I painted up a few months ago, where there are three robots, of possible canine affiliation, howling at some unearthly planet's strange moon.  People demanded a t-shirt, but I didn't do t-shirts back then, and I didn't think a design with approximately a billion colors in it would be cost effective regardless.  But these guys I've been doing t-shirts with recently do their shirts digitally, which means there can be as many colors as you want.  And so I'm totally doing it.

The second, "Medication," is one of those things where I throw an idea on the wall and see if it sticks.  I'm still new to t-shirts, experience-wise.  And these shirts are print-to-order, so I can afford to do that.  Indulge me!

The third shirt is one that Dina wears in Dumbing of Age.  It may or may not be about boners.

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Here's "Grappel" with some Reprolabels on him.  I used most of them but not all of them, mostly leaving off the faction symbols since I prefer the ambiguity of the Rub Sign.  I also left off the tummy grill sticker since I thought the existing painted deco was fine, plus a few other things.  Some of the silver stickers on the side of the vehicle mode covered some horizontal grating lines, but I was able to keep that detail by running over it with a toothpick.

And finally, I finished the silver paint on the wrists with a silver Sharpie.  The factory paint only covers half of them, and I always thought that looked kind of off.

Some pictures, I guess.

So we've waxed about NYCC Bumblebee and Arcee, but the figurines of Jack Darby and Raf Esquivel who come with them are enticing to me as well.  I like toys of humans, okay?  I will forever desire toys of Robot-Master, Bomber Bill, and the Mechanic.  I've bought lots of live-action-style Transformers (again) because they were repackaged with human characters!  I imported Kicker.  And I am actually a little angry we never got toys of Sari Sumdac or the Angry Archer.

I like the characters in Transformers stories.  And many of those characters are humans.  It makes sense to me.

Like Arcee and Bumblebee, Jack and Raf here are going to be released later to retail, though of course not in this NY-specific deco.  Jack has a New York t-shirt, which is cool, but Raf seems to have a white New York ... sweater vest.   That sounds especially not real.   I would love to be proved wrong, though.  And then lose however many dollars it takes to get one.  I will totally cosplay at BotCon next year as New York sweater vest Raf.

These figurines aren't to scale with anything.  Which is just as well, because they're not going to succeed at it.  Arcee and Bumblebee aren't in scale with each other, so any attempt to make Jack or Raf in scale with either of them is going to cause failure somewhere else.  So I'm glad they're small-but-not-too-small, and also that they exist.

Really, though, what I want is Miko.  She's awesome.

The toys come in a pretty nice packaging display that you can remove the plastic bubble from without too much trouble.  That leaves you with a city street with a guardrail in front of a row of beveled skyscrapers.  It's pretty great, and I put a T-Rex in it.

I mentioned the New York theme to most of the NYCC-exclusive Transformers set yesterday. Emphasis on the "most," unless being pink and white is some Big Apple-y thing I'm not aware of. (I would not rank this as an impossibility.) Bumblebee gets to be a taxi, and the two humans get to wear New York t-shirts. Arcee gets to be pink and white.

Not that I'm against pink and white. It just stands out as an anomaly.

Obviously Hasbro was going for a Classic G1 Arcee color scheme for her, as Arcee is normally black and blue in the show.  I'm of two minds with this.  The first mind tells me that I don't really care for G1-inspired redecoes on folks who don't appear in them and I'm not particularly fond of G1 Arcee in general.  Mind Number Two reminds me that toys in these colors happen basically never, and I should savor this.  And I do.  The toy is gloriously pink.  Not red or somewhere in between so little boys might be fooled into buying a girl, but out-and-out Barbie Dream Car pink.  It's a novelty.

My friend Sam reminded me that Arcee in War for Cybertron is pink and white, so this could be Arcee in a transitional form in between then and now.  I was happy, frankly, to repurpose this toy as someone else entirely in a recent strip.

There are many things about this toy that I like.  Sometimes motorcycle toys go through insane contortions to get from a passable motorcycle into a passable robot.  Animated Prowl is perhaps still the master at this.  Arcee isn't quite as elegant an execution, but she's not a failure on any scale.  I like  how simple her leg transformation is.  Often this is the annoying part of the motorcycle Transformer, but her legs just sit side-by-side in robot mode, sharing a wheel which splits up during conversion.  The arms kind of messily hang off the sides, but they're hidden well enough.  The only thing that really bothers me is the mess of kibble directly behind her head, and how the handlebars located therein conflict with her shoulders.  Her shoulder kibble and her back kibble are not meant to coexist.  They will be a source of annoyance.

Prime Arcee is one of the Autobots' most agile and formidable warriors, so I'm grateful that the toy has a large range of movement built into her, short the shoulder/back kibble battle.  Her elbows are double-hinged and her hips and knees are versatile.  And she has a rotating waist, plus a neck that's balljointed at one end and hinged at the other!

I really like Arcee, the character.  Despite being the only girl on the Autobot team, she's not characterized as such.  Her personality and individualized pathos are frequently showcased, and she became a quick favorite of mine.  I'm glad I was able to get an early version of her, even if it will eventually be displaced by a more accurately color-schemed variant.   Also I really really really really hope little boys will buy her toys as readily as any other awesome character.  (Obviously, her being blue instead of pink would help facilitate that.)  If any female Transformer could manage that, it's her.

Transformers: Prime toys are yet to debut in stores, but between SDCC and NYCC, I own five of its characters already.  Hasbro should really get on that "TF:Prime in stores" thing.  Unlike SDCC's Optimus Prime, whose biggest deal was the fancy packaging he came in, this box set of toys sold at New York Comic-Con is actually redecoed for the occasion!  They come in a packaged diarama that's done up to look like a New York city street, there's Bumblebee as a New York taxi, there's Jack Darby and Raf Esquivel wearing New York t-shirts, and... Arcee's pink.  ...yeah.  She must have missed a memo.

From that set, today I'm talking about Bumblebee.  There's a bit of deja vu about him.  I am going to blow your mind by reporting that he's basically Yet Another Movie Bumblebee toy.  I've been here before, with the hood chest that splinters apart, the arms that tuck in somewhere/anywhere/pleasegodplease, the door wings, and the rear of the car hanging off the calves at at angle.  If you've ever transformed a Movie Bumblebee toy, this will be a very familiar experience.

There are some cosmetic and engineering differences, of course.  I particularly like the way his hood balls up, starting as a wide block and squishing in on itself to more approximate the big sphere that is Prime Bumblebee's chest.  There is a lot of hidden jointing in that torso.  Don't forget to fold the corners of his bumper down into his ribcage!

His shoulders are weird yet interesting.  The fronts of them fold off and his arms hide away under the car in layers.  The upper arm splits in two and runs along just inside the doors, while the forearms tuck up and over the pelvis just under the roof.  The way they hang in robot mode is not ideal.  They feel at little unstable when they're pulled all the way out, as you'd expect them to.  The instructions ask you to keep them mostly inside the hood, just sort of poking out sideways, in a way that does not resemble his appearances in the cartoon.  I've decided to compromise, and have them stick halfway out of the car at an angle.  This is more stable, but not terribly screen-accurate.  (Group picture shows them all-the-way-out and the solo robot mode picture shows my chosen configuration.)

If you like Movie Bumblebees, you'll like this guy.   Thanks to Letao for picking up this set for me!  He also printed out a huge image of Catman to carry around NYCC, Robin Desanto-style.  Because he's awesome.

I stopped being a lazy shit and put up the T-Shirt FAQ I promised long, long ago.  It is, of course, just Joel Watson's T-Shirt FAQ but with some words replaced.  I am so classy.

But hey.  It's there, and it's linked from all of the t-shirt order pages.  Huzzah?  Progress?

I like to think so.