Tonight Smallville ended, and so we had a little pizza party to send it off into the void.  We also got a cake.  At first I thought, y'know, put a Superman S-shield on there, but no.  The cake needs Smallville's real hero, John Glover's magnificent head of hair.

Though after watching the final episode, perhaps a more suitable choice would have been the creepy ghost of Jonathan Kent.  That effer's everywhere.

Lookit me, wiling my way into pre-street date Dark of the Moon toys!  I'm like a DPCI ninja.

Here's the new Bumblebee.  Normally I'd be satisfied with my old Bumblebee, but the third movie gives him an altered vehicle mode and a retooled robot mode, so I kinda need a representation of the "current" version.  Now Bumblebee has a little skirt on the front of his bumper and a new spoiler, plus this toy has those little NASCARish grills in place of the side windows.

(Disclaimer: I know very, very little about NASCAR.)

Oddly, during the transformation to robot mode, the NASCARish grills stay attached to the back kibble and translucent blue windows fold up in their place for robot mode.  These blue windows are only for robot mode, and cannot be used in vehicle mode.  Weird!  Movie 3 Bumblebee also has a new, bulkier torso design that this toy tries to replicate the details of.  Pieces of the front bumper skirt fold up into new abs for Bumblebee, while the sides of front of the car still fold out and up.

I am told that this mold is very similar to last year's "Battle Blades Bumblebee," a reportedly fantastic toy that I skipped 'cuz I knew Bumblebee was getting an upgraded form in a year.  Some say this toy is a slightly scaled-down version of Battle Blades Bee, but I don't have Battle Blades Bee to compare with.  Regardless of its creation history, this version of Bumblebee is pretty easy to get back and forth from robot mode.  ...compared to previous Bumblebees, anyway.  The first Concept Camaro Bumblebee from the first movie was a relative chore!  I don't mean to say that this toy is simple, no, because it's not, but it's complex in a way that everything fits together neatly and transforms logically and cleanly.  What seems to aid the toy's transformation, versus the prior Bumblebees, are the way the front wheels fold out of the way entirely during transformation, allowing the arms to maneuver out freely.  And large parts of the car's roof fold up into a big ball of stuff which hangs off his back... which definitely gets it out of the way, though it can look inelegant in robot mode.  This kibble snaps back into vehicle mode very easily, which is a trait that I believe makes up for any ugliness.

Bumblebee's forearms have "c joint" rods so you can attach clippy weapons on there.  I'm glad that functionality is continuing.

And finally, we get to Bumblebee's MechTech weapon.  Ratchet's, if you recall, was glorious.  I couldn't stop playing with it.  Bumblebee's isn't nearly as great.  All pressing on its lever accomplishes is open up the gun into a larger gun.  When you're done pressing on the lever, the gun reverts back to its brickish form.  Not a single spinny saw!  Oh well.  It can plug into 5mm ports on his forearms, be held in either of his hands (the thumbs open a tiny smidge), or they can be pegged into hidden 5mm ports in his back kibble, which, when mistransformed, extends the weapon over his shoulder.

It's a very good movie Bumblebee.  It's probably not the BEST movie Bumblebee, since the very awesome deployable battle mask of Battle Blades Bumblebee is missing from this version, but it's definitely up there.  Perhaps it's the second best.  I own a very small fraction of all movie Bumblebees, so I can't give a real informed opinion on that.

There are a lot of movie Bumblebees.

On the strip's subject, I just got back from visiting two Targets.  The first wouldn't get stuff out of the back because I wanted one toy out of an assortment, and the guy didn't think it was okay to open an assortment for one guy for a collector, which is very reasonable, and the second Target totally got me a Bumblebee.  That Target actually had ZERO Transformers out on its clearance-tagged pegs, so I figgered that probably greased the wheel, so to speak.

I can't help myself around Ratchets, okay?  I'm sorry!  I wasn't even gonna get this one, but after picking up Sentinel Prime, Graham and Avery and I went to another Target to find some Deluxes so he could get one of the Wreckers, and when the employee offered us Deluxes, I asked for a Ratchet.  I knew there was a new Ratchet in there.  One I didn't have.  One I didn't need.  I'm sorry.  I'm sorry.

I can't even use this guy for anything.  He's too small to hang out with my other movie toys, and I even have another Deluxe Ratchet which I bought because I liked Ratchets which looks more accurate to his robot mode.  The only way he's not redundant is that he's the right vehicle mode (rather than the previous Deluxe's truncated vehicle mode) and he's in the altered vehicle mode deco that Ratchet has in the third film.  I am a fool.

But now that we've got rationality out of the way, we can move to matters of the emotional level.  See, this Ratchet is awesome.  He's not quite as movie accurate and he's way too small, but he's pretty fun to play with.  He strikes a very good balance between complexity and accuracy, meaning his transformation is pretty damn straight-forward.  Even so, there's some interesting bits in there, like how his head, shoulders, and arms rotate around 180 degrees while his chest and the rest of him stay put.  It's just fun to do.

But most importantly, Ratchet's weapon, while a completely ridiculous-looking oversized chunk of plastic, is well worth the $12 all by itself.  The line-wide gimmick of the larger Dark of the Moon toys is "MechTech" weaponry, and Ratchet's is his saw blade thingy.  When you pull on the lever, the saw spins and flips out and spins and spins.  It's intoxicating.  And I made a video of it for you so I can more adequately share it with you, for words are useless in this arena.



And bam, now you want DOTM Deluxe Ratchet.

Hey, guys! There was a two-page mini-comic about Animated Cheetor from a few weeks back, and its artist, M Sipher, is putting up the originals on eBay. You should check them out here and here.

It occurred to me that I owned a toy of every unique character released in the various Animated toylines, save just two guys. I'm not talking about the same-character redeco stuff, no. But other than Activators Ramjet (Japan-exclusive) and Black Rodimus (Japan-exclusive), I kinda had them all. (There is an "additional Starscream clone" toy also from Japan that is sort of maybe a new character as well, but it's kind of nebulous and he doesn't get a bio or anything, so I don't really care.)

Black Rodimus came out last week, so I figged, hey, why not, let's get 'im. What's his story? Surprise, Megatron cloned Rodimus Prime using Starscream's cloning technology.  How novel!  Y'know, one of those experimental prototype things, to see if it'd work on a larger scale. But whoops, evil Rodimus just wants to take over the Decepticons, and he's actually pretty good at it, so now Megatron has a problem on his hands. The end! It's a dumb story, but it's a story, and so it's a hole in my collection that my brain requires me to fill.

Black Rodimus is exactly what you'd expect in a "black repaint' Rodimus toy. He's basically Shattered Glass Rodimus colors. And to that end, it would have been suuuuuuuuuuuuuuper awesome if they'd given him Shattered Glass Rodimus's goatee. I mean, c'mon. Evil clone! But no. Black Rodimus's purple is metallic, like most of the rest of Japan's Animated line, which doesn't look tacky on this toy, thankfully. And it's a good toy all around, regardless of color, so it's nice to have another of it.  Buying an evil clone guy would have been a much tougher decision if it were of a toy I didn't like.

I'll of course be getting a third iteration at BotCon next month, when they give him a new head and call him Breakdown. I'll welcome that, too. Again, good toy.

The live-action Transformers films have been making the craaaaaaziest stuff super-mainstream.  Not that I'm complaining, no.  It's actually crazy in the awesome way.  Kids know who The Fallen is. That is absolutely insane. And suddenly it's gonna get kinda Sentinel Prime-y up in this bitch.

A Sentinel Prime was just in Transformers Animated, to be sure, but he was a far cry from the original concept of the character.  Such as it was.  Since, well, the original Sentinel Prime wasn't really anything more than a namedrop.  He was mentioned in a list of Primes once or twice in the old Marvel Comics.  He's the guy that preceded Optimus Prime as bearer of the Creation Matrix.  His job was to die offpanel so that Optimus could gank his jewelry and become important.   In Transformers Animated, that definitely wasn't the case.  Sentinel Prime was Optimus Prime's buddy/rival.  The jerk friend.  A contemporary.  And, I might add, my favorite character in the series.

But in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Sentinel Prime seems to be back to his roots.  He's the former Prime, the one that preceded Optimus, and he's gone missing or whatever and I guess his ship's on the moon.  He's the shipwrecked guy everyone saw in the first teaser trailer, beardin' it up.  We learn more about him in IDW's prequel comic series, Foundation, where he's a father figure that marched the planet into a new Golden Age and set up Optimus and Megatron as co-rulers of the planet.  But Megatron knew Sentinel liked Optimus more, what with knowing that he was a Secret Prime, and so, well, war happens.  (How Sentinel Prime ends up on a ship on the moon hasn't been covered yet.)

So, woo, yeah, I was excited about a toy of Sentinel Prime.  Like The Fallen, he's a character that builds the history and mythos of Transformers.  And he's in the first wave!  And Target employees don't often read street date notices on case assortment boxes!  Or they do and, dude, who the hell cares if some nerd has his $50 toy fifteen days early.  (Sentinel's DPCI# is 087-06-2294, btw, if you want to chance it.  That's right.  I just typed that from memory.)

But oh lord, this toy.  This toy.  I spent an hour trying to get him into vehicle mode last night.  And what a really fucking awesome vehicle mode this would be, if it were a bit easier to get into!  It's a friggin' fire truck.  Fire trucks are awesome.  Especially ones with all the little nozzles everywhere.  The attention to detail on the fire truck is great.  ...if you can get the damn robot mode into it.  Picture the most annoying Transformer you've ever attempted.  This guy might be worse.  I tried again this morning, meticulously examining each step along the way in the instructions, and still it was not incredibly enjoyable.

The instructions have gone through an overhaul.  Instead of a series of Illustrator drawings or whatever, a series of photographs are shown.  Which, you would think, would be an improvement!  In some respects it is, but... it's also pretty damn incomprehensible at times, regardless.  Some of these photos are reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally tiny, and it's hard as hell to discern how things are supposed to be oriented in such tiny pictures.  In a toy such as Sentinel Prime, where an arm rotation being a fraction of a millimeter off can cause disaster, this is a real annoyance.  Nothing like holding the instructions right up to your damn face, trying to figure out which side of the forearms are supposed to be facing which way, via an image of the toy in half-transformation that's probably no more than an inch tall... not a good time.  Not a good time.

And, yes, after a half hour or so,  you finally find out exactlyish where everything's supposed to go, and all you have to do is fold the big silver lid on the top of the truck down on top of everything, sealing it.  Ahahahaha.  No.  It doesn't want to stay there.  The lid doesn't want to seal.  And it's not because you friggin' missed a step, it's just that the tabs are too shallow.  And so it pops up at a slight angle like a bad Tupperware lid, giving you an eternal peek at the casserole inside.   This is your reward for your time spent.

Anyway.

Sentinel Prime comes with two handheld weapons.  The first is the "Primax blade," which is a double-bladed sword.  It folds in half and can store under the aforementioned silver lid in truck mode, if you want the lid to shut even less.  Sentinel also comes with a big Mechtech shield thing.  If you press a button on the face of it, it springloads out into an X shape.  It can store underneath the truck or mount on the top front of the truck, combined with the Primax blade in some unholy configuration that I don't understand the purpose of.

There are electronics, which are neat.  If you press a button on Sentinel Prime's sternum, his mouth opens and he says, "I AM SENTINEL PRIME!" in a voice that can vaguely pass as Leonard Nimoy if you're forgiving.  In vehicle mode you press a button on the roof of the fire truck and sirens blare.

He will spend his time in robot mode.  And when I decide my life is too happy, I will attempt to transform him, to knock myself down a few pegs.

So I snapped up this Mezco Scott Pilgrim toy at the comic book store on Wednesday.  There were two to choose from: this purple-shirted Scott with the open grin and a green-shirted Scott with a determined frown.  Otherwise they were identical.  I chose open grin!

The figure's okay and all.  It has articulation at the neck, waist, wrists, and biceps, with shallow universal joints at the shoulders.   Neither of the hands is pointing, which is kind of weird.  And he comes with a guitar and his testicle-sword.  It appears, when you hang his arms down at his sides best you can, that one arm is a smidge longer than the other.  I figgered this must be so he can hold his sword two-fisted.  Nnnnope!  He definitely can't do that.  I mean, he can hold it by the hilt and by the blade, but that's kind of weird.  So, uh, maybe one arm's longer so that it can hold the guitar better?  Or it's an optical illusion? I don't know.

Frankly, the best thing about this toy is the friggin' guitar.  It's amazing.  It has a real leather strap and it's sculpted and painted up real nice, and you can give it to other, better toys.  That's the real feature.  Besides, getting this thing over both Scott's big-ass head *and* one of his arms is a harrowing experience.  It's not a long strap.  It can't be, if it's gonna rest at proper length on his torso, and, again, Scott has a huge-ass head, unlike real human beings.  I'm afraid the leather strap is gonna snap.

So, yeah, I apparently just bought a $15 guitar accessory.  Not the worst of things, no.

The Kickstarter Book 4 preorder thing clocked in at $9,404! Hot damn! Thank you, everyone, for believing in me monetarily.

As our reward, we share this photo:

At this writing, there's fewer than 23 hours left to preorder/pledge for Shortpacked! Book 4!   If you want to make sure you get a sketched-in book or a chance at some unique swag, this is your last chance.  Don't miss out!

Also, I've just put in for an Artist Alley table at BotCon this summer.  So look for me there!  At least, look for me there when there's not an interesting panel or it's lunch or something.  I'll be bringing Dinobot posters and some other interesting new goodies.

HEY DUDES! Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the best webcomic you are or are not reading, now has a book!  You may remember SMBC as the fantastic webcomic that pulled off this amazing feat, re: gayness.   As for its book, you should totally get one.  And then put it right next to your eventual SP! Book 4, like they're making out.

That's right. Both our books are dudes.