I'll definitely BE at BotCon.  There's no question about that.  But other than one year a decade ago, I've never had a dealer table there.  That one year I went home making more money than I'd spent, but it was a very miserable, cold experience, because I didn't get to see anybody or sit in on many panels 'cuz of the whole have-to-be-at-the-table thing.

But now that BotCon has this artist alley thing they're trying to cultivate, I'm tempted to try it out again.  Mind, I would absolutely not be at that table all day, every day, like I am at every other convention.  I'd have to close up shop, throw a bedsheet over everything, and buzz my way into panels I'd want to see.  I'm comfortable with this.  I'm selling paper goods, not MISB Overloads.  But would you guys who are going to BotCon and also interested in patronizing my wares, would me not actually being there 50% of the time be worth it to you?

Basically, what I'm asking is if whether I can at least sell, say, 12 books to cover the table and shipping costs.  Or 19 Dinobot posters.

Deluxe Warpath here is kind of like a weird footnote in my brain.  He was so barely on my radar I still don't really register him existing, despite having gotten him in the mail 36 hours ago.  I suppose my anticipation factor for him was pretty low.  He's just Warpath!  I got a new toy of him in the last batch of Generation 1 retreads.  And, well, he's just Warpath.

He punctuates his speech with "POW!" and "KABLAMEE!"  That's his entire personality, right there.

So,  yeah, it's a Warpath.  He looks a lot like Warpath!  He still has the turret chest with the barrel poking out and the treads on his arms and feet.  He's dark red and silver.  He's Warpath!  This version did borrow the trick from the previous Warpath, the Legends Class toy, with the collapsing tank barrel.  It pushes into his chest in robot mode, and it's engineered that so when it's extended in tank mode, it can articulate up at an angle.

People seem to dislike Warpath not being a real tank.  He's an "H-tank," which means he's a tank that doesn't look like a rectangle from the top, but instead a smaller rectangle with four "legs," each housing a set of treads.  On this matter I don't really care.  H-tanks are a staple of Transformers by now, and while some dislike them, I tolerate them if only for the variety they bring to tank alternate modes.  Hell, I got Rumble and Frenzy just last week, and they were also tanks.  I'm happy that Warpath's tank mode has a different silhouette.  It also allows a better visual upgrade to his original form, with the treads on both his arms and feet.  I dislike when Transformer toys break treads cleanly in half during transformation, so splitting the treads up into smaller, self-contained chunks to begin with avoids this.

In tank mode, in addition to the barrel articulation, his turret can also rotate.  This is a feature I'm always happy to see in Transformer tanks, and usually it requires the turret to stay on the robot mode's back, unintegrated into the rest of its robot mode form.  Not Warpath!  It turns, plus it manages to fold down into and become the robot mode torso.  There's also a spring-loaded missile launcher on his right shoulder.  This is notable because spring-loaded weaponry seems to have been kinda slowly budgeted-out of Deluxe Class toys in recent years as prices remain the roughly the same and production costs continue to skyrocket.

I was disappointed to learn that the missile launcher and the non-functioning weapon on his other shoulder weren't "c joint" snap-on accessories.  They really look like they should be!  But at least Warpath has places on his arms and legs that you can snap other guy's "c joint" accessories onto him.

His color scheme's a little boring.  I mean, yeah, it's exactly like the original Warpath's, but I kind of wish he had a brighter accent color somewhere.  He does have bits of gold, but it's hard to distinguish those parts from the silver, since it's a very desaturated gold.  As a nod to his sole personality trait, as I mentioned above, tampographed on either side of his tank mode are "K4-90W" and "Z0W-333."

I sound kind of down on the toy, but I'm really not, over all.  He looks great in robot mode and I enjoy his big treaded stompy feet.  The fun of a robot mode is a very important attribute that can help me overlook minor disappointments elsewhere.  He's a much better Warpath than the one I already had, but I think I would have preferred a toy of a guy I didn't already have as Generations' last hurrah.

Speaking of which, the head in Warpath's instructions belongs to Hardhead.  Guess what old toy they'll be  wanting me to replace now!

Part of the reason I'm hesitant to collect Eva stuff in general is that nobody ever even makes any damn Shinjis, much less Gendo.  Stupid teenage girls!

(Gendo, like Batman, is comedy gold.)

When I preordered Scrapheap's three-pack, I knew I'd be selling off at least one of the two other guys. Blue Rodimus was a no-brainer.  Screw that dude!  I don't need him!  And I figgered I'd probably be selling off the extra Kup, too, since I was pretty satisfied with the colors of the Generations Kup that I already owned.  He was green!

And the photography of the e-Hobby three-pack Kup depicted him as bright blue, almost a cyan.

I really hate when Kup is blue.  And Kup is blue all the time.  He's blue all the way through the Marvel Comics.  He's blue in the Big Looker Storybooks.  He's blue in all sorts of obscure merchandise.  But his toy is teal, as Kup should rightfully be, and Kup was sort of a grayish dirty teal in the cartoon.

Part of the reason for Kup's often-blueishness, though, is his original toy just doesn't photograph right.  When you put a camera to it, photos come out cyan-y.  I can't imagine Hasbro or Marvel or whoever could be bothered all that much to make sure that they were color-correcting all of their reference material as they sent it back and forth from one another.  So, well, blue Kup.

(For the record, I would totally dig a blue Kup if they went through the trouble of swapping his helmet and face colors like the toy's.  I would love a Big Looker Storybook Kup.)

And a small part of me hoped the same was true with the official photography of e-Hobby's Kup.

Indeed, e-Hobby Kup is deliciously teal.  Bright and vibrantly so.  (After I took photos and he insisted on coming out cyan, I attempted to color correct his colors as much as possible in Photoshop.)  As much as I liked the darker minty green of Generations Kup, I can't resist a more vividly teal color scheme.  So it looks like it's my Generations Kup that has to go.

Another thing that sets this Kup apart from the other decoes is his painted battle damage.  There's silver paint scrapes painted up and down the surface of his vehicle mode.  This is a look that's appropriate for Kup, so I'm glad to have that as well.  It's a nice bonus.  It wouldn't have been enough without the teal, but with the teal it's something I won't scoff at.

Teeeeeeeeeeeeal.

One of the best people in the world, Dave Kellett, is up for an Eisner Award this year!  His collection of Sheldon comics about literature has been nominated for "Best Humor," and dude deserves a win.  He's not only a best peoples, but he's also a fantastic cartoonist.  A cartoonist's cartoonist.  A god among men.

You could get lost in his eyes.

If you're eligible to vote in the Eisner Awards (meaning, you're a cartoonist or graphic novelist of any stripe), you're invited to download a PDF of his Literature book for free.  Y'know, just so you know that, come voting time, you're making the right choice.

In the realm of somewhat less important voting, Hasbro's assembled the Transformers Hall of Fame votes they've received from the Various Internets into a list of final five nominees.  You can start voting on them now at transformers.com!  Be sure to click their graphics so you can read their profile.  I am not going to tell you to vote for Waspinator.

The second guy from Scrapheap's e-Hobby three-pack is this translucent redeco of Classics Rodimus.  He's blue and greenish with some yellow.  He's supposedly intended to represent the scene in The Transformers: The Movie where Hot Rod is at Optimus Prime's deathbed and he catches the Matrix of Leadership as it's being passed from Optimus to Ultra Magnus.

He's sort of pretty.

That's about all I have to say about him.

I'll be auctioning him soon, whenever I get around to it.  I mean, he is sort of pretty, but I don't need him.  I've got two many versions of this mold in the house already, and one of them I also need to sell!  (Challenge at Cybertron Rodimus)  And I've got a Transformers Club Side Burn on the way.  Yeah, this guy's got to go.  I'll let you folks know when that happens.

I'm actually much more interested in the box's art than I am this little blue Rodimus.  We'll see if I can cram in images of both it and this toy.  If not, the box wins out.  Sorry, Rodimus!

UPDATE:  Whoops, looks like you'll have to go to TFWiki to see the car mode.

I gots an e-Hobby 3-pack!  It came with a pointless translucent Hot Rod, a potentially redundant Kup, and this third guy who I actually wanted.  How much of the rest of the set will I be selling off?  Further news as events warrant!

The guy I wanted was Scrapheap, who is a Junkion.  He's not the first non-Wreck-Gar Junkion toy to be made, but he's the second!  The first was Detritus, an e-Hobby redeco of Hound from several years back.  I don't have him.  Though with the potential for an actual Junkion army, I kind of want to now.  Oh well!  No big.  Not like he can ride anybody.  He was, as I noted, a G1 Hound redeco.

Scrapheap's a retool of Reveal the Shield Wreck-Gar.  In addition to Wreck-Gar's head, the mold has two other generic Junkion heads, and Scrapheap uses one of them.  There's no plans yet to use the third anywhere, but it'll probably be a long while before that happens, what with the third live-action film imminent.  Scrapheap gets his name from a list of Junkion names that one of the original cartoon model designers came up with for the other Junkions.  The Ark: A Complete Compendium of Character Designs applied the name to a prominently-featured generic Junkion, but this toy's head seems to belong to the guy the Ark book dubbed "Rubbish."  D'oh!

The colors I'm a little lukewarm on.  It's just chocolate brown, bright red, and a few shades of silver.  It's a little boring.  I mean, yeah, Junkions are earthtone colors, but I feel like I would have preferred something a little more vibrant.

Not that it matters too much.  This guy's probably going to be spending a lot of time in motorcycle mode.  The Wreck-Gar/Scrapheap mold is designed to ride itself.  ...if you know what I mean.  There's two pegholes on the motorcycle seat and two corresponding pegs on the underside of the robot mode pelvis.  There's also slots on the side of the motorcycle that can attach to the robot mode legs of the rider.  That's what the main event is.  Scrapheap exists so Wreck-Gar doesn't literally have to ride himself.  He can ride this other guy that looks 90% like him.

I'm tempted to get Takara's version of Wreck-Gar and chop off one of my Wreck-Gar's beards just so I have three distinct Junkions.  Hmmm.

So I guess I only do an Eva strip every time a Rebuild movie comes out.

Which means it's that time again, and coincidentally it was also my birthday, so my wife got me a Revoltech figure of Asuka Langley-Sohryu Shikinami, because she knows I have this thing for Asuka.  I cannot help it!  It's not my fault!  She's just too awesome.  This is just the way of things.

This is a figure of her new plugsuit that she wears starting halfway through the film (no additional spoilers here).  On the plus side, there is additional orange.  I love orange.  On the downside, apparently the orange is like a translucent torso window.  I was about to type that somebody in NERV loves fourteen year old girls a bit too much, but then I realized the Internet would implode from the sheer unrivaled obviousness.

The best thing about this Revoltech figure, really, is the little box that it comes with that you can store all of Asuka's extra parts in.  Oh my god that's so wonderful.  I lose accessories like people lose skin flakes.  The parts kind of have to settle in just the right way for the lid to close, but it's certainly a far cry better than just having to keep the packaging tray forever to store all of the tiny hands.

In addition to all of the extra hands, Asuka also has two additional faces.  This would be most excellent, except the face I would like the best, the angry shouting face, doesn't really look like such when you plug it into the back of her cranium and slap her bangs back on.  See, the bangs cover up her eyebrows.  In anime, usually the eyebrows are drawn through the hair, eliminating this visibility problem, but this is a three-dimensional object.  With the eyebrows covered up, it just looks like she's happily shouting.  That's her wearing the angry face in the suspended-by-the-display-arm image, for reference.

Another difficulty is how the hands swap out.  I really have no idea what I'm doing with most of these pieces.  Some of the extra hands have the wrist-joints connected to them, and some of the extra hands have to connect via an extra wrist piece.  On top of this, there are two different sets of wrist-cuffs or whatever to place over this set-up like a washer.  Why is this done this way?  I do not know.

The actual figure is great, of course.  It's a Revoltech figure, and so it's a big pile of ratcheted joints.  That's what Revoltechs do best, is be a big pile of joints.  Hell, even the hair is jointed.  It splits up into three parts, so you can have it fly in the breeze however you please.

Thanks, wife!

The wife and I still need to find the time to see Evangelion 2.22 together.  I have seen it in English, as Asuka sounding like anybody other than Tiffany Grant is just wrong to me, but Maggie cannot stand any English dub of anything.  This is one of the few things in which we are incompatible.  So when we get some time I'll have to brave through the English subtitles.  Which is fine by me, since it was a pretty crazy/awesome movie that I don't mind seeing again.