Hey, look, I'm back!  My first comic drawn in many, many days.  So, of course, enjoy my talking heads.

This set, one bought online from the MattyCollector site, was a pleasant surprise.  I am thoroughly in love with it, even though, going in, I wasn't terribly excited about it.

I was buying it for Kalibak, who was a character introduced to me in the Superman: The Animated Series episode, "Father's Day."  In it, Kalibak attacks during (surprise) Fathers Day, and Pa Kent is trapped under a collapsed building.  What made me hate the episode was how it was executed.  Superman knows his father is on the brink of death, buried under tons of rubble.  But yet Superman takes his friggin' sweet time while fighting Kalibak.  I'm not talking just about the fighting itself.  Whenever Kalibak gets knocked out temporarily, Superman sorta brushes his hands together, turns around, and starts walking as slowly as he can back to where he last saw his dad.  Why?  Because this episode has 22 minutes to fill, by gum!  It was excruciating.

It wasn't the best foot to start out with, regarding Kalibak.  I mean, otherwise, he's all right.  I mean, he looks nothing like his purported father, Darkseid, but I never really understood the genetics of Apokolips to begin with.   And he sounds like I. M. Weasel, just like Worf does!  How can you go wrong.

But what brought me around to loving this set were the toys themselves.  Kalibak's sculpt is gorgeous.  The ones that Mattel takes the time to sculpt uniquely always tend to be, but Kalibak is one of my favorites.  I think it's his asymmetrical expression.  One side of his mouth is a grin and the other side tucks into a grimace.  Facial expressions can make a toy, and this is a great example of that.  It's also nice that he's as wide as he is tall.  He's a big block of plastic.   He's only got shoulder articulation, with both his hips and neck fused into the sculpt, but who the hell cares.  He oozes personality just through his face.

When I ordered the set, to me Darkseid was just the guy who came with the character I didn't already have.  I have a couple Darkseids already, so while it was nice that this was the Brainiac-infused version from the very last episode, it wasn't a "must have" figure.  I mean, hey, if I display this new version of Darkseid, does that mean I have to put away my Brainiac toy?  I don't think they can coexist!

But getting him in-hand, my feelings changed abruptly.  This Darkseid toy is kick ass.  It makes the vanilla Darkseid look stupid and boring.  Brainiacked Darkseid has lots of contrast and color vibrancy.  The best part, however, are his new sculpted parts.  He's got a new shoulderpad piece that fits over his head and torso, plus he has new forearms.  The new forearms are what especially tickle me.  You see that right hand of his that's sculpted into a "I will crush you" pose?  It's fucking awesome.  It's the best handsculpt in the world.  The neutral open-palmed fist sculpts of the older version are very good, but what replaces them is amazing.

So now I need to figure out if I still get to display Brainiac.  I guess it'd kind of help if I didn't, what with all these new army builder figures and space arrangements being what they are, but, let's face it, that's a losing battle.

Also, I discovered a few days later that Darkseid is way better at holding the Matrix than either of the two Transformers it comes with.  So enjoy an extra photo I tacked on.

I'm on a boat right now, safely out of the country during the fallout from that Christmas Eve strip.  I am a shrewd man who values his life.

Last Monday I talked about my Manhunter Robots JLU set and how I was still on the lookout for the counterpart 3-pack that included Despero.  Well, I found him the next day!  And this is me writing about him that night, but in a post scheduled for... the future!!! Technology is grand.

(I always wonder, dude, what if I suddenly die?  How weird will it be for these updates to continue popping up after I'm gone?  Well, just in case, ooooOOOoooOOoooo speaking from beeyoonnd the graaaaveee...)

Anyway, check out this Despero.  Man, he sure is Despero!  Like the Manhunter episode, I didn't particularly care for Despero's episode either.  Which is weird, because the second season of Justice League was pretty great.  But at least Despero sounds like Goliath!  I kept expecting him to tell people about how one thousand years ago, superstition and the sword ruled.

Despero the figure is kind of a disappointment because of his size.  Why did they use the Green Lantern body?  That's the shortest of bodies!  Even Katma Tui casts a shadow over him.

Speaking of Katma Tui, man, what kind of friggin' name is Katma Tui?  It sounds like a Jawa war cry or someone spitting or something.  Anyway, it's nice to have her in her real skin color, rather than that brownish hue her original toy was.  I was also surprised to discover, after putting both Katma Tuis together, that their uniforms are different.  And I did some Internet sleuthing and learned that Brown Katma is based on her brief appearance in a later episode, where she has a more-revealing Green Lantern outfit and appears to have darker skin.  That was nice to learn.  I'd previously worried that Mattel made her black just because John Stewart should only be dating other black chicks.  No, they were just following an errant screenshot.

No screenshot can fix that receding hairline of hers, though.  Yikes.

In conclusion, the spell is broken, and Despero lives again.

Happy New Year!  I'm in Miami.

No sooner than I get my "Challenge at Cybertron" set than I find out that it's coming over here as "Battle in Space," minus Galvatron.  Normally, hey, who cares, but instead of Galvatron, there's an exclusive-friggin' comic book.  An exclusive-friggin' comic book that retroactively places Lugnut at the Battle of Autobot City during the animated 1986 Transformers film.  Aw, no.  I neeed that.

And so I have some nigh-identical figures.  The only differences are Rodimus and Cyclonus now have Rub Signs instead of tampographed symbols.  Which is actually preferable to me.  I'll ditch the old tampographed ones on eBay and keep the Rub Signed versions.  Also, woo, comic.  And woo, Matrix?  There's a die-cast Matrix of Leadership in here that no one can hold.  Well, no Transformer in this set, anyway.

Certain rulers of Apokolips can hold it.

Lookit me, buying Reprolabels.com's upgrade sticker set for Reveal the Shield Tracks for not the same reason as everyone else, because I'm unique and counter-culture-y!    Ah-heh.  No.

Anyway, nobody likes Tracks' new tribal-style flame deco on his hood, and so everyone was super happy when Reprolabels made a sticker set for him that gave him some labels that'll cover them up with a more classic-style flame pattern.  Yeah, I didn't want those.  The tribal-pattern flames don't bother me, and the retro-style flames are just kind of gross.  Plus, yikes, they were designed by the guy who drew this.  I don't want that on my stuff.  I have some scruples left.  Not many, but a few.

Instead, I was all about the other stickers included in the set, most of which you can't see in this photo because I didn't feel like transforming Tracks back into car mode just so you could see his new foglights.  There's also a license plate sticker and some chrome silver stickers that apply on the business end of his side-view mirrors.  That's the kinda stuff I always like seeing in these sets.  I like "completing" the vehicle mode.

The robot mode stuff is almost always secondary to me.  But there's an awful lot more of it than the vehicle mode stuff, so that's why there's a picture of it here.  He's got yellow stripes on his feet, which I much appreciated, some more-complete red stripes on his wings, which I was okayish on, and green stripes that wrap around his missiles, which are okay by me because I like adding color like that.   There's also silver stickers that go on his knees which I only added because at that point I was having fun putting on stickers.

I'm gone, but that doesn't mean I can't load up some toy talk into the queue ahead of time!

First of all, let me get out of the way that I didn't realize the Unfortunate Implications of the photograph until, well, whoops.  Anyway.

Check out these "Manhunter Robots"!  This is to distinguish them, I imagine, from the non-robot Martian Manhunter.  Lots of hunting of men in the DC universe.  In theory.  See, it's weird, because I don' t think Martian Manhunter even really ever hunted men.  (He hunted that lost little girl once, I guess?)  The Manhunter Robots, however, seem to better deserve the description.  We've seen them hunt dudes!  It was just John Stewart and it was in a terribly boring episode I never want to see again, but it happened.

Man, I hate that episode.

So, of course, I spent $15.99 plus tax (oh my god how did it come to this) to own characters from an episode I didn't even like.  This is completism, folks.  Don't let this happen to you.  A decade ago I had to work myself up towards even buying a friggin' Batman and maybe a Joker, which took a lot of justifying at the time, and yet here I am now buying Manhunter Robots.  What the fuck.

They come with Green Lantern.  They also come with these little sticks.  I had to look at a screencap or two to find out which end they hold the sticks by.  I'm still not entirely sure.

But at least they're pretty appealing-looking.  Big and angular and glossy.  And new sculpts!  They are very nice toys from an episode I couldn't care less about.

Somewhere out there is the other new 3-pack from this wave which includes Despero and Green Lantern again and that girl Green Lantern he banged who Mattel won't deco as her actual skin color for some reason.   Maybe I've found it by the time this post publishes!  Probably not.

Merry Christmas by ~zibanitu6969 on deviantART

It's a Christmas post!

This is my new Fansproject Sidearm.  He's a "third party product," or "we pretend Hasbro doesn't own this intellectual property" toy.  So I'm kind of a jerk for owning one, but him just being an accessory to a Hasbro product I already own makes me feel a little better.

He's nominally an add-on to the "Not Rodimus Prime" trailer upgrade for the Classics Rodimus toy, but I didn't care about that.  Thankfully, you could buy this fake Firebolt toy all by himself.  What's crucial is that he's designed to fit into Rodimus's hands (sorta, more on this later), which have non-standard pegholes.  His fist pegholes are way too small to accommodate the usual 5mm weaponry.  That was always annoying, and kept me from just using the original Firebolt with my newer toy.  So, hey, woo, something fits.

...but as I said, sorta.  I have no idea why they did this, but riiiight behind the right-size-for-Rodimus peg is the right-size-for-the-Rodimus-Prime-add-on peg.  Right behind!  What the hell!  So, really, Rodimus can't hold it at all.  ...unless you tuck his hands inwards at the wrist, at a half-transformed placement, so his other peg can have room to go.  whyyyyy

So that was a major disappointment.  At least the rest of him was pretty neat.  I mean, he transforms into a gun, and in a different way than in the character he's pretending not to be.  Plus he clips onto the spoiler while Rodimus is in car mode, which is appreciated.

He also comes with some other "intended for use with the bigger Rodimus Prime upgrade" parts, some chrome spoiler pieces.  These are not pictured.  They're also supposed to be able to clip onto the side of Sidearm to make a sort of crossbow thing, but this does not actually seem to be feasible.  The parts won't clip on.  So oh well.  Not a big deal to me.  Those parts can go in a baggy up in the attic somewhere and I'll never care about them again.