Transformers sure has been ringin' my Marvel Transformers bell recently.  Earlier this year we got Masterpiece King Grimlock, which was done up with his blacks as comic-blue and his Marvel-only crown.  Generations has already given us Lord Straxus from issues 17 and 18.  And in this new wave we get both Thunderwing and Skullgrin, who were prominent Decepticons from the Marvel material.

Thunderwing was one of the string of Decepticon leaders that rose to prominence following the disappearance of Megatron.  It's anyone's guess why he was chosen out of the entire 1989 lineup to be the New Big Bad.  Thunderwing wasn't the largest of that year's Decepticon toys.  He didn't even rate an appearance in toy commercials.  His packaging profile painted him as a typical lying, deceitful Decepticon.  But nonetheless, Simon Furman chose him to be the Big Bad Dude in the days running up towards Unicron's arrival.

What set Thunderwing apart from all the other Decepticon leaders was, amazingly, his compassion.  Unlike Megatron or Straxus or Galvatron, he actually seemed to care about the welfare of his troops.  That doesn't mean he wasn't a jerk.  He had a crazy streak in him that grew out of his escalating obsession with finding the Creation Matrix.  Eventually he possessed it, but really it possessed him.  Tainted by evil, the Creation Matrix took control of Thunderwing and transformed him into a careless monster.  When he turned on his own troops, he had a brief moment of clarity as the weight of what he'd just done dawned on him, and he pleaded for the Matrix to leave him.  You never saw anything like that from the other Decepticon leaders.  This other, sane side to Thunderwing made him a little more three-dimensional than the rest.

Anyway, Thunderwing was a popular guy, and the good news is that because of this he gets a new toy.  The bad news is that he gets it during a year in which all of the "Classic"-style Transformers are Deluxe Class guys!  One of the few things I didn't like about the original Thunderwing toy was that it wasn't quite big enough.  He needed to be larger to interact with and/or tower over his contemporaries.  But the new Thunderwing toy is smaller still.  D'oh!  And he's one of the smaller Deluxes.  D'oh again!  He's a little taller than, say, Deluxe Classics Bumblebee, and shorter than most everyone else.

Part of it has to do with how much of his alternate-mode mass ends up on his back.  ...which is all of it, so there isn't much toy left to make the robot very large.  As a result, he's basically a jet with a robot folded up underneath, which isn't unique to him among jetformers at all, but is still a little disappointing.  The advantage to this is that since none of his robot parts become jetparts, he can be as accurate to the original Thunderwing as designers wanted, and he is pretty damn accurate.  He's like a little Thunderwing action figure with a jet on his back.

I don't mean to imply that he's incredibly simple, because he's not.  True, his arms just line up under the wings, but the rest of the transformation was more complex than I was expected.  A piece of the chest unfolds out of his torso and hides his head and streamlines the curvature of the undercarriage.  His legs shorten not by shoving the thighs into the shins, but by unhinging everything apart and folding the legs up further into the inside of the body at the hips.  I also like how the jet wings fold out into shapes that remind me of feathered wings.

Thunderwing's got a few other surprises.  Though Hasbro couldn't budget a little robot for him to pal around with, Pretender-style, the nose of the jet does detach and become a little jet drone.  His massive double missile launchers combine to form an even bigger double missile launcher.  I kinda wish the jet drone attached to this combined weapon, but it doesn't seem to.

Getting back to that "Marvel love" stuff, what's most interesting to me are his colors.  Thunderwing spent most of his comic book appearances looking like an approximation of his vivid toy colors, or at least as close as the comic book coloring process could manage.  But then suddenly in his last two major appearances, the colorist dropped his color scheme and just made him an all-white guy with green arms and a yellow face.  Generations Thunderwing incorporates those green arms into his color scheme, which is surprising to me.  Hasbro tends to stick to the original toy colors, so taking inspiration from a specific two issues of the Marvel run is pretty neat.  It's too bad the face is more Don Figueroa than Geoff Senior.

Drawing to a close, this is a damn fine Thunderwing if you don't have a Thunderwing.  The original Thunderwing is mighty expensive on the secondary market.  I was super-lucky to have friends who chipped in together to get me him a few years ago, and he's one of the bigger joys of my collection.  It was also one of the better toys of its era!  However, this new Thunderwing is definitely not one of the better toys of its era, but it's also only $12 instead of eleventy million.  He's a great character and I'm glad he's earned a second chance at retail.  Everyone can own a Thunderwing!

Unless you live in the UK, because Hasbro over there is kind of dumb.

If there's one thing I didn't like about the various Voyager Class Animated Starscreams I'd accumulated, it's that they all had the same face!  (If there were two things I didn't like about them, the second would be that they take up so much shelf space.)  All these Starscream clones had different personalities, some whose facial expression really shouldn't be the Classic Starscream smirk.

So it was about damn time Reprolabels gave us a sheet of stickers to remedy that.  It's not perfect, since all of the faces on the sheet are colored in Starscream gray, rather than in the colors of the clones' faces, but weighed against them all having the same smirk I'd say it was a fair trade.

There were a few other stickers for the nominal Starscream as well, such as the colored logos.

If you're attending the Second Annual Webcomics Rampage in Austin, TX, be sure to RSVP!  It's required for getting in to see the panel with myself, Jeph Jacques, Danielle Corsetto, Randy Milholland, Joel Watson, Josh Lesnick, and Bill Williams. The panel has limited seats, so RSVP so you don't miss it!  Plus, it's helpful to know how many folks are gonna be around for the signing that happens afterwards.

Your friend and mine, Zach Weiner, who you definitely know from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal,  has teamed up with Chris Jones to create Captain Stupendous.  It's his first book through a major publisher, and it'd be awesome if we could help make it a success.  If you like deconstructed superheroics, give Captain Stupendous a look.

At the moment, I'm putting together the packaging art for the box for PatchTogether's Robin DeSanto statue.  The statues are shipping out from the overseas factory tomorrow, with expected delivery at the end of the year or the beginning of next.  There's only 20 of these statues left unbought, so you'd better get on her before she's gone!

Next I need to figger out what Ethan's statue is gonna look like.

And finally, today Something Positive name-drops Roz, because the name on her birth certificate is actually "that crazy girl."

Hey hey, what's new?  Thought I'd throw some images together that I'd taken recently.

Here's a new photo of Nexus Prime, aka "Nexus Maximus," aka "the guy who used to share a name with a dildo." (NSFW) My original Breakaway, Nexus Prime's arm, always had a little problem with the combiner connector plug.  There was a warp in the plastic or something that kept it from securely fastening to the combiner's torso.  At best it could loosely hang on the connector stub via gravity.  I've been meaning to replace him for years, and finally bit the bullet when the Transformers Collectors' Club store had him on sale a week ago.  $5 off!  Hooray!

Man, you can imagine how dusty and dirty the rest of my old Nexus Prime looks when he's got a new shiny arm.

Once I had a working Breakaway, I could finally do interesting stuff with that arm, and so I took a new photo for the Transformers Wiki.  The old photo was kinda washed out anyway, and I'm better at photographing these things now.

Next up is a photograph of e-Hobby Sunstorm.  Years ago while moving I lost one of his orange tailfins, which was really infuriating, what with his secondary market price being like $500.  That's a lot of money to drop for a replacement tailfin!  But not too long after my dilemma, they reissued him, and I got a new Sunstorm for (relatively) cheap.  Well, heh heh, that new Sunstorm had been sitting in its box, untouched, for over two years.  Finally I got the inspiration to take him out; I had noticed that his Tfwiki page needed a proper photograph of the original toy.  The Sunstorm in the photo here is a Frankenstein of my first Sunstorm and my new one.  Basically I stole one of the tailfins and also grabbed the landing gear and the jet-mode missiles for the jet-mode photo.  And, yeah, lots more dusting.  Yay, dusting.

He's so orange.  So deliciously creamsicle orange.

Hmm.  I also got some new Reprolabels in yesterday, but I think I'll save photos of those for a future blogpost.

Hey, dudes, there's one last  hurrah for me this convention season, and it's a doozy!  On December 11-12, Dragon's Lair Comics in Austin, Texas, is holding Webcomic Rampage!  It's Saturday and Sunday, each day beginning with a panel featuring all of us webcomics guests, and culminating in some Webcomics Christmas Shopping.  Who's coming?

David Willis of Shortpacked!/Dumbing of Age
Danielle Corsetto of Girls with Slingshots!
Joel Watson of Hijinks Ensue
Bill Williams of Side Chicks
Randy Milholland of Something Positive
Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content
Josh Lesnick of Girly

These are all awesome people and Webcomic Rampage is going to be awesome.  Be there!

I remember, long ago, when I dared to dream of a world where Action Master characters would be given new toys that can transform.  And not just, y'know, one or two, but a whole fleet of them, as if it were God's mission to give every single last untransformable guy a new transformable toy.

Ladies and Gentlemen, that world is now.

Axer was actually the first!  True to the circumstances of the time, he was just a random redeco with his name planted on it.  That's how it happened back then.  He was a black motorcycle.  Sort of fitting, since Axer was a nonstransformable robot who rode a transformable motorcycle, so it was close enough at the time.  But he was in the wrong colors and, judging by how the original toy's sculpt looked, actually transformed into some kind of automobile.

So, woo, hey, hell yeah.  About ten years later, Hasbro's given us our second Axer.  Okay, he's called Axor now.  And, being in the live-action film continuity, he's likely a different guy, though since the first Axer was a dimension-hopping fellow, I'm pretty okay pretending Axer and Axor are the same dude in my Personal Canon.  They're both ruthless bounty hunters, though Axor's now got some sort of stalky/fanboy thing going on about Lockdown.

Axor represents one of the first instances of Hasbro's new mandate for Transformers toys: they all have to have alternate heads (and/or other parts) planned out ahead of time and put into the original tooling.  That way, they can give more individuality to their redecoes, so that not every redeco shares the same noggin.

So Lockdown's tooling has not only his own head and his hook-arm, but also somewhere on the sprue there's a Axor head and an Axor axe.  Depending on what toy is being produced, one set of those is gonna be gated off.  (Or still produced and thrown back into the vat, who knows.)

Giving guys new heads used to be the territory of BotCon, but, whoops, now Hasbro does it constantly.  It's got to be getting pretty tough for Fun Publications, now that Hasbro's cranking out all this stuff that used to be their bread and butter.  Not even G2 is safe!  Not even Pretenders or obscure Victory guys or comic-only characters are safe!  Hasbro will scrape the bottom of the barrel long before FP even gets a chance!

So, yeah.  New head, new axe, new deco.  It's BotCon all year long now.