Man, y'know what I like? Animated-original characters getting toys in other lines!  You may remember that I was super in love with Revenge of the Fallen Lockdown and his Animated-inspired rivalry with live-action Ratchet.  I also adore that Bulkhead is one of the main Autobots in Transformers: Prime.  And, hey now, look, it's Reveal the Shield Lugnut, everyone's favorite five-eyed sycophant, in Generation 1 style!

Did you know that Lugnut was in the 1986 animated Transformers film?  Well, he was.  Sort of.  According to the comic book that comes with the Rodimus/Cyclonus "Battle in Space" set, which retroactively places him at the Battle of Autobot City, anyway.  That's the kind of stuff I like, the new additions that are presented as if they'd been there all along.

Frankly, after getting your hands on this guy, you'd be happy for him to be in every continuity possible.  Out of the huge box of swag I got on Friday, I'd rank his toy as the winner in all respects.  There's just so much going on with him.  Let's work our way through them.

First of all, I am super digging his alternate mode.  It's a giant war bomber.  Folks tend to describe it as a "WWII bomber," but I can't really agree so long as he has jet engines instead of propellers.  The second best thing about this mode is the amazing wingspan.  Usually, Transformer plane wings are stubby so that they fit into the packaging in vehicle mode or a conservation of plastic mass is attained.  But Lugnut gets around that by being packaged in robot mode and by having his wings transform into his arms.  Often wings just get thrown onto the back of a robot mode as kibble, but Lugnut uses the wings to add to his robot mode mass.   The FIRST best thing about his vehicle mode is the missile that launches out of the back of the tail, which calls back to those World War II-era bombers.  You flip up the little gunpod at the very tip of the tail, and underneath is the missile launcher.  In robot mode, this launcher can point over the shoulder.  ...Or up under the crotch, if you're crude.

How Lugnut gets massive arms out of his wings is inspiring.  His hands transform out of the jet intakes(?) on the wings, the wingtips fold over onto the backs of the hands, and then the wings articulate like arms.  Each hand has two articulated fingers and a thumb.  (He can go grabby grabby.)  It's a feat of engineering we haven't seen before.   Animated Lugnut had a "Punch Of Kill Everything" attack where he'd punch the ground and create a massive crater, and this version of Lugnut tries to borrow that as well.  Both of his fists have spring-loaded punch gimmicks.  You could use this to make his wings even longer, but I don't think it's necessary, and it leaves a few gaps.

(Oh, and his mouth can open and close.)

In my reviews for the past several toys, I've talked about the new, shared "C joint" gimmick, where toys come with clip-on weapons and a number of rungs for those weapons to attach.  Well, Lugnut is the holy mother of this.  He doesn't come with any weapons, but he has rungs hidden all over his body that can accommodate 15 clip-ons.  There's one on the missile launcher.  There's four spread across his shoulder jet engines.  There's two on each of his shins.  There's two each more on the backs of his wrists, hidden under the wingtips.  And there's one more on both of his wingtips.  I wouldn't be surprised if I found even more later, but at that point I'd be put out, 'cuz I'm out of weapons to attach to him.  (I think the next time I get more is whenever Wheeljack comes out.)

To sum up, you have to get this guy.  He's an amazing toy that can do buttloads of stuff and he's an appealing character with a memorable visual design.  Any toy with giant articulated fingers is already going to be near the top of my list, but Lugnut gives me that and so much more.  If you see him, snatch him up.

With my deluge of new toys, it was kind of hard to decide which one to talk about first.  Do I go from least favorite to most favorite, do I go from most favorite to least favorite, do I go randomly, as the wind turns?  Do I say "fuck it" and start a site about stamp collecting?  I ended up going with Wreck-Gar, because he's this month's featured article on TFwiki.net, which meant I felt he needed pictures the most immediately.  There's not many days in this month left!

I've never owned a toy of Generation 1 Wreck-Gar.  My only Wreck-Gar toy is the Animated version, who's a similar but different character.  Reveal the Shield Wreck-Gar fills a pretty obvious hole in my collection, because, dude, Wreck-Gar.  He leads the Junkions!  He talks TV!  He sounds like Eric Idle, except when he doesn't!  ...which is truthfully all the time, because Eric Idle's voice was processed so much you couldn't really tell it was him anyway.

Getting him out of the package, my first thoughts were, wow, this is a friggin' huge toy.  Maybe this was because I'd recently opened and played with RtS Laser Optimus Prime, who is a munchkin, but mostly it's because Wreck-Gar is legitimately pretty big for a Deluxe.  ...in vehicle mode, anyway.  He's very tall, since conservation of Deluxe Class mass means a thin altmode is going to be wider in other dimensions.   And as I transformed him and put him on our coffee table, I realized that this was probably going to be my favorite toy of this batch.  I mean, look at him.  Look at that devilish grin.  He just has all this personality.  And something about his visual style just tweaks my nipples or something.

I changed my mind a lot on how much I liked him on the way back into vehicle mode.  He was boggling.  I ended up with a bunched up torso and arms and some flailing legs that refused to fit into where they should go.  It was not a fun time.  Thankfully, it's not the kind of transformation that I hate, with the meticulously interlocking panels.  I was just missing a step somewhere, obviously.  It was murder trying to figure out what that step was, is all.  I think it turned out being something to do with how the upper thigh joints connected into the pelvis.  They unlock further, and doing that gives the bike mode the leeway to fit into itself better.

I really want to get Wreck-Gar's transformation down to a relatively short amount of time.  The Junkions' whole deal is that they ride each other in bike mode, get knocked off each other, then transform and swap places.  If it takes half an hour to get a dude back into bike mode, that's harshing on my playtime.  At this point I should mention how grateful I am that having one Junkion ride another Junkion is even possible.  The original toy was a super-wide bike that transformed into a robot with unarticulated legs.  The cartoon was kind of an asshole, repeatedly showing the Junkions doing shit that their toys could never ever do ever ever.  RtS Wreck-Gar makes up for that in spades.  He is obviously supposed to ride other iterations of his mold.  The underside of his pelvis ends in two square pegs, and there are two square pegholes on the seat of the motorcycle.  His fingers are also molded into a "holding onto handlebars" shape.  So once they redeco this guy into another Junkion, happiness comes to town.

He's really brown.

His rear hubcap and its corresponding exhaust pipe clip off and unfold to become his battle axe weapon.  The hubcap portion also unfolds, going from "fan" to "pinwheel."  Wreck-Gar can hold onto the axe by the handle, or he can stow it on his back using the clip.  Or, of course, any number of other contemporary toys can use the axe, by either the handle or via their own clip joints.  (Lugnut has like 15 million.)

This is the toy Wreck-Gar's deserved for decades.  And it looks like the mold has at least two other possible Junkion heads (e-Hobby uses one, and another is featured in the instructions), so you're probably going to be seeing a lot of it.  What I'm saying, I think, is that I'd better friggin' like this toy, because I aim to own all of them.

I had preordered Reveal the Shield Laser Prime at the same time as the rest of his casemates, of course.  But he got shipped all by his lonesome.  This was a little annoying to me, since, y'know, that's $7 of shipping for one dude when it could have been $7 shipping for three dudes.

But it was made up for.  'Cuz, wow, today I got six toys delivered.  The other guys from Laser Prime's assortment that I wanted, plus guys from two other assortments.  So I consider it a net gain.  I think Laser Prime got sent alone only because he wouldna fit into the box with the others.

It's like Christmas in January!  Expect some toy reviews this coming week.

So, like, Chris Hallbeck is one of my best buddies. We've shared convention tables so many times, it's like we're married! Sometimes we finish each other's sentences.

He's known to mortals as That Guy Who Does The Book of Biff.   (He also looks like a taller version of my roommate, Steve-o.)  But now he has a second webcomic, Maximumble, and this one has more than one panel per day. In fact, it has three panels per day! With a full four panels per day now, that's quadrupling his output!

Anyway, Maximumble is really funny and you should read it.

When I was in high school, Generation 2 Laser Optimus Prime was the fucking bomb.  It was seriously the best Transformers toy ever, hands down.  I wasn't alone in this assessment: in the Nineties the annual online Transformers fandom awards gave Laser Prime the #1 spot on the  "Best Toy Friggin' Ever" poll for years and years after his release.  The only thing that knocked it from its lofty perch was the arrival of Masterpiece Optimus Prime.

What granted the toy immortal status was the context of its birth.  Laser Prime came out late in Generation 2, just as Hasbro decided, hey, maybe we should, y'know, give these guys some, like, knees and elbows or something.  Laser Prime was the highest-priced item that year, so what he gave us was a very sizeable, very poseable, very electronic Optimus Prime who not only came with one of the best missile-launching and disc-shooting trailer bases ever, but he also rocked the fucking sword.  (Which, in theory, would light up along with the rest of his electronics if plugged into his fist.)  Laser Optimus Prime was fucking badass, and he was the most fucking badass Generation 1/2 Optimus Prime toy for a friggin' decade.

Some people prefer the mold in his "Black Convoy"/Scourge colors from Robots in Disguise.  (Who inspired a tiny Spy Changer version of the toy that later got redecoed as Optimus Prime in a "Circle of Life" sort of way.)  Me, I go for e-Hobby's Laser Ultra Magnus, who you see accompanying this blog's subject in the photos here.  And I still love that toy.  So It was hard to imagine what a newer version could bring to the table.  Wasn't the original Laser Prime mold good enough?  Was it that dated?  Could it be improved on 15 years later?

So here's Reveal the Shield Optimus Prime, who's an homage to ol' Laser Prime.  He's just a Deluxe Class toy, compared to the, uh, whatever large undefined size class original Laser Prime was.  So, yeah, RtS Prime is pretty tiny.  He's even pretty tiny by modern Deluxe Class toy standards.   He's shoulder-height with Generations Thunderwing and Classics Bumblebee, which makes him one of the shortest Deluxes ever.   It makes me wonder what about his construction made it too costly to make him bigger.  Bumblebee came with that sizable transforming jetski/trailer accessory, so that's a conservation of mass.  Thunderwing is mostly wing, and so he's about as big as he can get and still fit into the bubble packaging.  With RtS Prime, though, I'm not so sure.  He feels like he has a lot less mass than, say, Drift or Straxus, both of whom tower over him and come with more accessories.

Might it be his complexity?  I'm not talking really about his transformation, which is indeed much more complex than the original Laser Prime's.  I'm thinking more of the extravagant series of lightpiping that runs through the top half of his body.  His shoulders, torso, and head are all full of translucent orange plastic, and so when you put him up against a light, he glows through all these sculpted cracklines.  It's pretty neat.  (And was probably intended as a replacement for the original version's electronic lights.)

But let's get back to his transformation.  One thing that this toy definitely improves on versus the original is the vehicle mode.  While Laser Prime's back end was unmistakably a pair of robot legs pegged together, RtS Prime's vehicle mode tries to make that back end look like an actual truck back end.  This means some liberties have to be taken with Optimus Prime's legs, and those liberties were definitely taken, with some very compelling results.  There's a series of flip-over panels that move out of the way from truck to robot mode so that you can compress the wheels into the insides of the thighs and shins.  This is necessary because, like a real semi, he's got those double-wheels, and double-wheels are wide!

I also appreciate how the windows of the vehicle become the chest of the robot.  Original Laser Prime had vestigial chest windows, which looked nice but were a real cheat, but RtS Prime says fuck that shit and goes the extra mile of moving the chest windows down into the robot mode.  And they even paint them silver so that they call back to Laser Prime's chest color.  (That is super appreciated.  If they'd done his chest up in traditional red, it wouldn't feel much like Laser Prime at all.)

When you fold the side windows in so that his shoulder jointings have a place to go, they press up against the insides of his chest window.  Why?  'Cuz there's a Matrix sculpted on the facing side of those window panels.  Oh fuck  yeah.  And in an undocumented feature, when you compress the remaining vehicle kibble into his backpack, there's a large slot there for his sword to stow.  His sword which transforms into the trailer hitch.  (Not nearly enough Optimus Primes have actual trailer hitches, instead of the usual humdrum peg and peg-hole.)

I'm not sure where I stand on RtS Prime's poseability versus the original's.  In theory, he has the original's joints and more.  In theory, he adds very-helpful ankle articulation to the pile.  His head is perched high on a ball joint.  And his additional wrist articulation allows him to, at long last, hold his sword double-fisted style.  But a lot of the rest of his articulation is hindered by the sculpt.  His waist could turn more than a few degrees to each side if his backpack didn't get in the way.  His elbows don't quite bend 90 degrees.  And the admittedly nifty collapsible leg wheels keep his knees from bending much.

So RtS Prime is something of a mixed bag.  Whether he skews awesome or meh depends on how you prioritize his shortcomings and improvements.  Plus he has some pretty big shoes to fill... literally.  What with being tiny.  And, hey, let's be real, here.  Laser Prime was the most awesome toy of his decade.  If he came out today, he wouldn't be so legendary.  ...which is just about where RtS Prime stands.

Today was a good a day as any, I suppose, to address what some folks had been pestering me about for the past few months.  They wanted access to old Joyce & Walky! subscription-only months.  But I took down that access way back when because it felt wrong to accumulate subscriptions while the project was on hiatus.  That storyline has kind of burnt a hole in my brain and so I've avoided finishing off the last few strips.

But days and months have gone by and no progress, so I figgered, oh, fine, what the hell, I'll let folks buy old months again.  So those are up in the store.  You can get either the first half, the second half, or the complete(ish) series.  Maybe the influx of interest might jostle me into finishing it up.  Subscription numbers had so dwindled in the end that it felt like I was sorta sending them off into the void.  That's why I prefer the free comic strip model.  It's open to everyone, and so there's more of a tangible sense that folks are enjoying things.  The more feedback, the more of a sense of accountability there is.

Procrastinators like me need a sense of accountability.  With Shortpacked! reaching six years old today, I thank you folks for, unwittingly, keeping my balls to the fire.

Robin is by far the best sculpt Patch Together has done for me so far, but there is just one thing about it that bothers me.  She's not on a base!  She doesn't really need one, individually, since she has that big cloud of Road Runner Dust, but it does cause my brain problems when she's displayed next to the other two statues.  See, without the vertical height down there, she looks short, or like she's standing in a hole or something.

Here I've set her on top of the lid for our Batman (of course) cup coaster container, but since then I've bought a little wooden stand from a hobby shop for her to use later.  After I paint it black, that is.  Cost me 60 whole cents!  I'll update you when it's done.

Oh, and I should probably remind you that the design for Ethan is still up for voting.

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Yay, FedEx brought me my Robin statues!  I heard through the grapevine (Twitter, that is) that Robin required some assembly.  This is sometimes required for Patch Together statues, depending on their shape, but my designs had mostly avoided it thus far.  We have a Monica statue from Wapsi Square that had to have its head glued on.  And Amber needed her corn popper put together and fit through her fists.  But no gluing yet!  Certainly not this much.

Anyway, fun story.  Because my life is a Wile E Coyote cartoon, I took one of her hands and her torso put two drops of glue on her wrist, and held the ends together for about five minutes.  After that five minutes I checked to see if the glue had held.  The parts came right apart, but my fingers, of course, were glued together.  Grar.

There's a handful still available!  Get her while she lasts.

And I've got things for you.

First of all, the Robin statues are shipping!  I haven't gotten mine yet, but reports are coming in and credit cards are getting charged.  Watch for yours!

Way back in 2005, I did a comic for 24 Hour Comic Day, and created a self-contained out-of-continuity 24-page story about the Head Alien and Monkey Master from It's Walky!.  That story's seen the Internet, but never print!  UNTIL TODAY.

It's been repackaged as an in-universe artifact from Dumbing of Age, my other webcomic where the Head Alien and Monkey Master only exist as fictional characters from a popular cable network cartoon.  All 24 pages are represented in this black-and-white comic book, as well as a "letters page" in the front that delves into the history of the "Dexter & Monkey Master" franchise in the Dumbing of Age universe.  Also, there's a spot on the inside cover for me to sign and/or doodle on if you ever see me in person!  Find it in the store.

Also, woo, now that I'm home, I can get back to some outstanding orders from the store.  Hooray!