Once again, you can find me this weekend at Mid-Ohio Con!  I'm going to be somewhere in the Columbus Convention Center on Saturday and Sunday.  It's weird having a convention that's just a few miles downtown.  I swear, I'm gonna leave the convention hall late Saturday and be confused when I step outside and it's not Hartford or Seattle out there.  I will approach the first local I see and ask what a good local joint is, and they will respond "Donatos Pizza."  And there will be this great tumult in my brain.

Tomorrow morning Maggie and I are driving back to Indiana for my grandfather's funeral, and will be returning Thursday afternoon, hopefully in time for Maggie's mom to arrive, for she is visiting!  It is a busy week for us, apparently.   We may or may not still have one hamster left when we return.  Gnngh.

Today I watched the new DC animated direct-to-video thing, Batman: Year One.  Since I've read the comic itself enough times, and this cartoon adaptation was extremely faithful, I was actually pretty damn bored with it.  That story needs a beginning, middle, and an end, am I right?  Bryan Cranston was excellent as James Gordon, but I feel like he was starring in a calendar, not a movie.  But, tell you what, if you like your Frank Millerspeak, this is the movie for you.  And I know some of you do, so that's not intended to be an indictment.  Plus it's very beautifully animated.

Thankfully, Arkham City is here to pick up any batslack.

This here is Fractyl!  His only real toy was from BotCon 1997, the year before I started attending them, so I've never owned a Fractyl.  Now I own a fake Fractyl!  He's the last 3H Wreckers guy I intend to make.  I'm technically missing the Alpha Trion repaint of Beast Machines Snarl, but if I'm gonna waste time and money painting something, I kind of want to direct that effort towards a character appearance that actually has a character appearance.  No, the one blurry two-panel fly-by silhouette doesn't count.

I like Fractyl.  He's a scientist.  He's a nice scientist.  The Botcon 1997 toy theme seemed to be "sympathetic bad guy and a jerky good guy."  Y'know, to mix stuff up a little.  And so he's this awkward antisocial creature who just wants to study some rocks, dammit.  Stop shoving him into his locker, Inferno!  Oh, what a geek.

And the Transmetal toy that they never made would have been beautiful.  Too bad.  My attempt at recreating it kind of sidestepped some of the beauty.  I wasn't able to find the proper greens.  My Fractyl is a reasonable approximation, but it falls short of the ideal.

Yay, Fractyl.

Boo, funerals.

First of all, yay!  Mid-Ohio Con is this coming weekend.  Saturday and Sunday, I believe?  October 22-23rd! That is good news!  The bad news is Book 4 won't be in the States quite yet.  The big pile o' books isn't expected to reach Columbus until the first week of November... if customs doesn't flag it for being terrorism, that is.  We'll see.  But I will have Roomies! book 1 and Shortpacked! books 2 and 3, as always.  I will have an extremely limited number of Dina hats.  And finally more Dinobot "Honor" posters came in, so phew.

The bummer part is I have a big pile of deaths to announce!  Two hamsters within the past week (mommy ham and "Pirate" ham), and on Friday my grandfather passed away after suffering from Alzheimer's for a very long while.  His body finally caught up with his mind.  You'd think, since he hasn't recognized me in about over a year, that this would be easier to handle, but it still stings surprisingly.  So this Wednesday and Thursday I'll be off in Indiana for the visitation and funeral.

We have one remaining hamster from our current batch.  She used to be the most skittish and wild one, but once mommy disappeared from her cage she just sits there, depressed.  We can even pet her now, which was a near impossibility before.  She just takes it, like she's given up.  This is definitely not helping my mood.

Anyway, enjoy this image of two Nightbeats powerlinxing incestuously.

Here's my completed Shattered Glass Nightbeat!  Finally I got the rest of the flames off the doors.  What's my secret?  Well, uh, I realized there was some extremely fine sandpaper in the paint box.  I misstook it for wax paper for the longest time, but I realized one side was a little rough, and I went to town on the doors.  Well, not really "to town."  I just had to get rid of the rest of the lingering flame deco shadow.  That shit was stubborn.

(And no, by "extremely fine" I don't mean I "went to town" on it.)

So, you know.  Some paint happened, after all that was done.  Most of the paint was extremely easy.  I mean, it's just flat black.  That shit paints itself.  It's that damn yellow mohawk I needed to paint that gave me trouble.  I must have tried that thing a billion times.  Yellow paint sucked.  Finally, I found my silver Sharpie, used that as a base coat, and then the yellow paint stopped just puddling off like Nightbeat was in the shower.  Still wasn't thick enough to actually make it look like the bright yellow it's supposed to be, but whatever.  It's done.

Jin Saotome was gracious in instructing me in how to put his decals on.  It was forever ago that Shawn Tessmann, the BotCon customizer guy, told me how these things work.  So Jin gave me a ringy-dingy, told me what's what, and the that was done.  ...at like 3 in the morning.  I keep late nights.  Mirrorverse Nightbeat was finally completed!

...until the next morning when I remembered that Cosmic Rust infections were part of his deco.  That was a few more hours.

Anyway, this is Shattered Glass Nightbeat.  There were some speedbumps, like when I had to cannibalize him some of Energon Hot Shot's knee/roofs because the alcohol crumbled the originals.  And the whole flame deco removal thing.  But I think he came out pretty nice, in the end.  And because most of him isn't paint, since he's just black detail on an unpainted toy, he transforms back and forth pretty seamlessly.  (It helps that, unlike the Animated Minerva I put together myself at BotCon 2011's customization class, this toy was put together by Chinese workers.  So it actually fits together well, and wasn't assembled by a moron.)

Hooray!  That's the only version of a Hot Shot toy I didn't own.   Cross that off my bucket list!

Within the past couple days, TakaraTomy, the folks who do Transformers over in Japan, have been doing crazy, crazy things.  Crazy things that I love.  Let me list you toys that we are getting early next year:

Enemy

"Enemy" was what some Hasbro licensee called their Rumble's-head-shaped electronic voice changer back in the 80s.  It was red,  unlike Rumble or Frenzy, which was also the color of Rumble/Frenzy's toy back in pre-Transformers Microchange.  We are getting that toy in red as Enemy.

Wingthing

Wingthing was Soundwave's Action Master partner.  He transformed from a bat to a gun.  Now he's going to be a redeco of Ratbat, just like Animated Wingthing was.

Nightstalker

Nightstalker was a Micro-Cassette kitty similar to Ravage that featured only in a Marvel UK text story.  He was likely based on a contest design that a British kid submitted to the magazine.  He is now going to be a redeco of Steeljaw in Ravage colors.

Wipe-Out

Wipe-Out was Trypticon's little sycophantic buddy in one issue of the American Marvel comics.  Until now, he was a toyless character, visually based on Tailgate's toy.  He's going to be a redeco of Windcharger, who in G1 shared some tooling with Tailgate.

Stripes

Stripes was a Mini-Cassette of Blaster's that was only mentioned in an early draft of The Transformers: The Movie.  He's going to be a redeco of Ravage as a tiger.  This is absolutely as obscure as one can get, even counting the UK text story cat and the guy who was just a head.

Seriously, you guys.  Whatever it is TakaraTomy's smoking over there, I want them to keep at it.  I'm rapidly running out of hypothetical Transformers holy grails.  I really think Stripes is absolutely untoppable when it comes to obscurity.  I mean, to get more obscure than him you'd have to start referencing Transformers fanfiction.

Pardon me, geekspasming out over here.

So I've been sitting on this extra Club Nightbeat for a few years, meaning to eventually kitbash it into Shattered Glass Nightbeat.  What's kept me from doing it for so long is that there was paint removal required, and after removing paint from Obsidian to make Rotorbolt, I felt confident in the procedure.

After all, the most important thing to remove is the tampos, right?  Those came right off Obsidian, no probs!  Like wiping spilled soup off the table.  If the normal paint doesn't come off, that's fine, since SG Nightbeat just needs to paint over everything with black.  It's just the flames on the doors that have to go before I can start painting him.

So I throw Nightbeat into a vat of alcohol.  It took Obsidian about 24 hours before anything began to fall off of him.  But 12 hours later, all of Nightbeat's paint is wiping off.  And, grargh, you guessed it, his flames remained.  Well, okay.  I took most of Nightbeat out, kept the doors in the alcohol and... it's been three days, I think, and I'm still trying to get rid of those stupid flames.  I have a brush and I have some paper towels, but the only tool that's making headway is my own fingernail.

It's quite infuriating.

Oh and apparently the alcohol made his translucent knee-roofs brittle and they broke.  But that is absolutely fine.  Really, it is.  As you can imagine with an owner of a Hot Shot Shrine, I have an extra Energon Hot Shot or two.  I'll just repaint and swap out those translucent pieces, no big.

Still.  Grrarghghglglgglllghrg.

While looking for Guzzle (and succeeding, yay Meijer) I also checked the GIJOE pegs.  Holy crap, they had a Steel Brigade dude!  Man, I don't pay any attention to GIJOE anymore.  He was a surprise.  Anyway, I totally grabbed him.

Steel Brigade was this promotional thing when I was a kid.  You send in this form where you fill in a name and choose a primary and secondary military specialty and also send in some money, and a few weeks later you got this Steel Brigade dude with a personalized filecard.  It was pretty damn sweet, not gonna lie.

Anyway, my guy's name was Tyranno.  Look, I don't know, I really liked dinosaurs.  If I recall, his primary specialty was something related to flying and his secondary was probably related to weaponry.  So,  yes, he was a guy named after a dinosaur who flew and had lots of weapons.  Maybe this is why I dig Wexter so much.  I mean, he is clearly the trifecta.

I am assuming that, true to Steel Brigade Guy's origins, that Steel Brigade is a bunch of mixed existing parts and a new helmet.  The new helmet goes over a masked face, probably Beachhead's.  The new Joes continue to come with a buttload of stuff.  This means he comes with two backpacks, which feels even stranger to me than more guns than he can carry.  I'm not sure why.  Anyway, one of them's full of removable rockets for his rocket launcher and the other is clearly for camping. There's also two black rifles, one of which can sit in the tripod.

Since Tyranno was a weapons expert, I gave him the backpack with rockets and the rocket launcher.

That's right, I'm calling him Tyranno.

I got two advance copies of Shortpacked! Book 4 in the mail today! Oh my lord, these are gorgeous. And theyre the thickest book Ive ever done, at 200 pages, so theyre big and thick and meaty. If you want to see more photos of the books, check out this entry from my Tumblr. This book is gonna be awesome.

Now we just wait for their countless brothers to cross the ocean by boat.

I've had this guy for a while, but I figger that now he's shown  up in the comic, maybe I should get around to talking about him.

There've been toddler-targeted Transformers lines before, but Rescue Bots is the one that's out now.  Next year it's apparently getting a cartoon!  (On The Hub, so you have to have Good Cable.)  I like trying out samples of Transformers toylines I don't plan on collecting (if it's inexpensive), so I tried this version of Optimus Prime.  Well, technically, it's two toys.  There's Optimus Prime and his human partner Charlie Burns, who are sold separately.  They interact, so that's why I got both of them.

Optimus Prime transforms very easily.  When he's in cab mode, just push down/straighten his legs and the rest of him springs into place for robot mode, sans the feet.  You gotta manually transform those.  To put him back,  you just push everything back into place until things snap together.  He has zero articulation, unless you want to count his manually-transformable heels, which you really shouldn't.  But this is good and appropriate, because this is a friggin' toy for toddlers.  Toddlers don't obsessively count points of articulation.  (Toddlers are, in this way, perhaps our betters.)

Charlie Burns comes with a convertible vehicle.  It goes from stand-rideable tanked claw thing to extended tanked claw thing that Optimus Prime can hold.  All you do is straighten the thing out.  There's some yellow buttons on the sides of the tanked claw thing that scissor the claws.  I was way more excited about the interaction until I realized that Optimus Prime's toy isn't exactly weighted so that he can hold the tanked claw thing weapon without falling over forwards.  If you're very lucky, or find some uneven shelving, it's possible.  Just don't sneeze.  But again, toy for toddlers.  Toddlers don't put toys up on shelves and leave them.  Toddlers play with things and then throw them against the wall.  They are, again, perhaps our betters.

But I am not one, so I don't find these toys terribly engaging.  If I had a kid that was 3 years old, I'd own every single damn one, but I don't.  Gotta start the tykes early,  y'know.

I gave in to my chattering inner demons and got iGear's replacement Kup head.  It's the one that's colored to match the eHobby redeco of him that I prefer because of all the bright teal.  You actually get two heads, one with the cy-gar and one without, plus a tiny screwdriver.  These both are snug inside some foam inside of a plastic box that fits perfectly in Kup's truck bed.  A nice touch, but that feature probably won't ever be used by me.

It's not that the original head was offensive to me.  Some folks think it looked terrible, but I never minded it too much.  It looked like Kup and it matched the body well.  But having the cy-gar in his mouth trumps everything.  For serious.  (It doesn't hurt that the new head looks like Guido Guidi's art, though, that's for sure.)  I just like cy-gars.  They're great props that can add personality to Transformers.  I made sure that Commissioner Garboil had one, for example.  I mean, can you even BE a head of law enforcement without a stogie?  I'm pretty sure you can't.

Mike is one of my oldest characters, as he originated from a story written in the opening weeks of fifth grade.  That was what, 1987?  Yikes, that means I've been drawing him for 24 years.  Can't believe it took him that long to knock some chick up.

Anyway, enjoy a stream of Mike Art Through The Ages, starting with the earliest I have on me, the blue-tinted one, which is from 1990ish.  Then watch me draw him fold his arms again and again and again for the next two decades.

Of all my characters, he's probably the one that's changed the least over time.  Hey, if it ain't broke.