fantastic_four

Nighthawk, Ka-Zar, and Odin? Those are some deep cuts even for the 1970s!

Also got a few new Mafex figures in--Storm, X-Factor Cyclops, and X-Force Wolverine. Love all three! Here are my Mafex and Mezco X-Men below including the three new ones. Also have the Mafex X-Force Deadpool incoming later this week.

I went WAAAAY overboard with the 3D-printed comic logos and bought two new sets--one from the same seller that were the secondary ones I wanted from his selection, and then a set from another Etsy seller doing 3D prints. I really wanted a vintage X-Men logo, and that's how I found the second seller. In the pic below of my new ones the second seller's logos are the ones with little bases on them underneath. I think I'm set for life on these now now...until I see the next cool logo, that is.

My kids (the two on the left) and our next-door neighbor like those comic logos as much as I do, and they immediately started posing figures around them.

Bought some 3D printed comic book logos from an Etsy seller. Very happy with how they look in person. They're great! First pic is all of the ones I bought, and the second is how they look next to 6-inch scale Marvel Legends figures. This is the seller, and he has hundreds of other options: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TJCustomCreations3D

That's what the last one was so no real surprise from me. Gunn movies so far have been highly competent but never great.

The packaging on the Jada Toys Street Fighter figures is awesome too. And lastly here's how Ryu and Fei Long look with recent Marvel figures for Marvel vs. Capcom displays. The Cyclops, Cap, and Rogue are Marvel Legends in the pics below, and the Psylocke is from Mafex.

Heads up for Street Fighter fans--a company called Jada Toys is starting to release a line of 1:12 scale Street Fighter figures that reviewers are absolutely raving about. The articulation, paint, and sculpt is about as good as Japanese import figures (as far as I can tell Jada Toys is an American company), yet the plastic is durable enough for kids to handle. The articulation in particular is better than anything Hasbro, Mattel, and McFarlane ever design. Wave 1 is Ryu, Fei Long, and Chun-Li, with a wave 2 planned of Ken, Dhalsim, and M. Bison. Price is great at an MSRP of $25, and they're being sold at some retail stores with people already finding Ryu and Fei Long at Target.

Not yet, but I'm all over that. I only pre-order under two conditions--there's a sale on pre-order items (mostly Target), or I suspect it's a figure that's HIGHLY in demand that will be hard to get once released. Not too many figures are in high demand, so I usually only pre-order to take advantage of a sale price. And when I do identify a figure I expect will be in high demand I usually pre-order multiples to sell later, usually 1 to 3 years later. I've mostly been buying multiples and pre-ordering Mafex figures over the past 6+ months since that line is sizzling red hot and it can be tough to get any copy of popular figures like Gambit or Symbiote Spider-Man. I can't fully gauge the popularity of this line yet, but I expect that temple escape Indy won't be too hard to find. I could end up being wrong and the line is selling out...always hard for us to guess how much supply Hasbro makes of any given item. For example they originally under-produced the GI Joe Classified Series figures when they first released and the first wave sold out fast, and now they're probably over-producing most of them and it has been really easy to get almost everything in that line for well over a year aside from new character releases like Serpentor. If you're unaware the same team that does Star Wars Black Series is also doing the Indiana Jones figures, so whatever LucasFilm person that doesn't like double-jointed elbows and knees that forced that with the Black Series is apparently forcing it with this line as well. I'm OK with it; Indy doesn't really get into Spidey-like poses.

My favorite figures so far this year are the new Hasbro Indiana Jones Adventure Series 1:12 scale figures. All I wanted originally was Indy and the build-an-artifact Ark of the Covenant, but of course the BAF concept sucked me into buying the others--and wow, they're mostly all great. The one I wanted least was Belloq in that ceremonial garb, but he's surprisingly great with far better articulation than you'd think a robed figure would have along with an EXCEPTIONAL head sculpt and paint. Indy is my favorite figure of the year so far and cuts a convincing Indy profile in almost any pose you put him in. Really love this line now and am all-in on it, and I can't wait for the Last Crusade figures to eventually come out.

I guess you both found out who their favorite was. I'm sure it was the old school parenting idea that you don't buy two of the same toy for two different kids, but instead buy one and let them share it. Although boys usually aren't great about sharing so I'm sure your brother lorded his Jabba over you to some sickening degree.

I've been avoiding Secret Invasion since I first heard about it in the comics for no good reason, really, except two--I'm busy, and I always hated the "Secret Wars" being called "Secret" for overly-simplistic and overly-sensationalist reasons, so I was automatically biased against Secret Invasion. I just learned this morning what Secret Invasion in the comics is even about. Now that I've given the story a chance I'm pretty interested in it. Last night I watched the new trailer and was utterly bored. I haven't watched the original trailer from September but will do so soon. Now that I know the comic series was a slow build to the big heroes vs Super-Skrull battles I'm far more open to whatever the series is about. But will we get anything close to epic without more build-up after Captain Marvel 2? I guess we'll see. Is there a chance there will be more to the story after Captain Marvel 2? Either way I'm looking forward to this now.

Because human civilization wouldn't work like this at any point during our history, so I don't see why Skrull civilization would, either. We are not of one mind--we are of HUNDREDS of minds here on Earth. Every nation is separate, and even within nations we have several or dozens of sub-groups that do not think alike. If every group of aliens in the 616 were either hostile or friendly to other alien species it would be EXTREMELY unrealistic--just as the comics have mostly been since the Skrulls were first introduced as purely hostile creatures. So I'm heartened by the idea that in Captain Marvel we saw the open-minded Skrulls, and here we may be seeing another Skrull group that isn't quite as noble to alien species. Certainly the expanded view of the universe once a civilization can travel between solar systems would set in with humanity so the Skrulls should be more united than we are today on Earth, but I highly doubt we would converge into a single group of humans with singular goals throughout the galaxy. So I would expect Skrulls, Kree, the Shi'ar, etc etc to all have different groups with different goals. I would certainly LIKE to think humanity would have a largely singular galactic vision as Gene Roddenberry showed with the Federation in Star Trek, but if I were immortal and around to see humanity become space explorers I certainly wouldn't hold my breath waiting for us to unite.

The main guy coming up with ideas for and approving designs for Marvel Legends is Ryan Ting, and I think this is the very first head sculpt they've re-used since he came onboard. They re-use EVERY part as much as they possibly can, but they haven't been re-using head sculpts since Ting started. I don't recall the year he started, but it was somewhere around 2015 or 2016. If you've watched any of the Marvel Legends streams from the past few years, or the toy convention interviews with the Legends team since 2015 or so you've definitely seen Ting because he's usually the most prominent speaker. Great guy who is fun to listen to. He also seems to collaborate somewhat closely with Jesse Falcon who used to be the primary designer for Marvel Legends when Toy Biz did them, and now he works for Marvel and leads their toy production efforts with Hasbro, Diamond, Disney, etc etc and seems to have a final say in what Marvel toys come out from all manufacturers. At least in the US...I haven't been able to tell if he has any involvement with international toys such as the plethora of high-end licensed Marvel action figures that come out of Japan. I can see them re-using Transformers molds, but the human face is what humans instinctively recognize and respond to the most so it makes far less sense to re-use faces. I wouldn't mind them re-using the hair, but the face? That's a whole new level of cheapness, and I hope this doesn't become common.

Stryfe is the character in that set most people want so he'll sell easily. He's a clone of Cable who was cured of the virus that inhibits Cable's powers, so he's a super-powerful version of Cable. Genetically he's the son of Cyclops and Jean Grey just as Cable is, but as a clone Jean didn't deliver him. Stryfe and Pretty Boy are the only ones I actively want because I'm unfamiliar with the others. I want to like Vertigo but am bummed they just re-used a Sue Storm head for her from the figure shown below. They haven't re-used a head for a different character like this in QUITE a while, maybe 5 years or so now, and I hope they don't keep doing it.

I'm buying one 1:18 scale line in the Jurassic World Hammond Collection, and all of the faces on those look like crud much like Duke does. Can anyone do faces well in that tiny scale?

Did it say it was refurbished in the Amazon listing? If so, then yep, don't do that again. I've never even considered that online whether the packaging had windows or not, which I only mention because a ton of collectors are assuming that the windowless packaging is the reason this is happening. I don't see that it is because the average employee at Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc has no idea if the figures are the correct ones on returns.

She's packing heat. 1970s-style unkempt heat.

Question for those who have played the game--have they ever touched on the subject of how much of the human's consciousness remains after infection and for how long it remains? The body horror of the infected is bad enough, but if there's a human trapped in there either in constant agony or screaming to be free then that's a whole new and higher level of horror.

The whole point of the infection point of the story, at least in the game franchise, is that mankind reached a tipping point in terms of what a global pandemic could do. The game was released in 2013. Lo and behold we had a global pandemic for real in 2020, which of course did not kill billions, unlike in the game, but which did kill millions and caused global disruption. The cordyceps virus is real and does affect insects in more or less the same way that the cordyceps virus does in the game, inasmuch as it takes control of its host through the brain functions. I don't know about allegorical tales and whatnot, all I was saying is that zombies are for voodoo and supernatural/sci-fi tales. This story is about the effects of a viral/fungal infection. The infected are not 'zombies'. They are human beings who have been transformed by a fungal infection originally transmitted thru' spores , not a zombie in sight. I agree that the distinction is not trivial between infected and zombies. Using cordyceps as the zombification device also changes the genre that the story falls into. Zombies are fantasy because there's obviously no known way for organisms to survive anything you do to them aside from destroying the brain, but a cordyceps infection brings essentially the same story into science fiction since we can imagine a species like cordyceps existing since it already exists in nature. Having said that if we drilled down into how a cordyceps infection would work with humans in real life it wouldn't be much like what we're seeing in the show, so I suspect the idea falls apart pretty quickly. A quick example--in insects by the time cordyceps is visible on the ant's body he's dead, whereas with humans obviously we see MASSIVE body transformations. Hard to see how cordyceps could keep a human body alive for as long as it does given that cordyceps in nature kills the ant after a relatively short time. To be fair they've said that most humans do die pretty quickly after infection, but still, we've got all of these different types of transformations that have no parallel with the real fungus. We could probably come up with explanations, but I'm not totally sure there's a completely satisfying one that would allow a human to stay alive as long as they do.

Bloaters have nothing to do with body obesity. It is a Stage 4 growth of the infection, typically an infected that has remained undetected or at least not killed for years, and during that time the infection has mutated. Various stages of infection are revealed and discussed in Game 1, with Game 2 revealing other forms of mutation. The body obesity doesn't explain why a bloater would be so tall anyway. I didn't think there would be a good explanation when I asked, but I held out (and still hold out) hope it wasn't just that they wanted the bloater to be bigger than life...but that's still my guess as to why they did it. It's a nit-pick, and not one that destroyed the show or anything. Just a momentary eyeroll in an otherwise-awesome series.

I'm still catching up and just saw Episode 5 last night. Why was that bloater so big? I looked up the actor and see that he's a 6' 6" bodybuilder--why did they need a dude that big in the suit? Are we supposed to think that something about cordyceps sometimes causes humans to grow, or should we be assuming that it was coincidence that a rare and uncommonly-large human just happened to become a bloater? It took me out of the show for a bit because all I could think was "welp, there's the boss for this level."

Does anyone have perspective on what China's overall box office is like in 2023 as compared to pre-Covid? I know they've been struggling with it longer between outbreaks and their government's Zero Covid policy that they finally abandoned, so I'm not entirely surprised to see box office numbers down there. But I really have no clear idea what their society is like right now which limits my perspective on the third film making well under half of what the previous two made.

I've always assumed it's a personal force field. In the comics I never noticed him turning it on and off, so the fact that he did turn it on and off in this film felt like a validation that it's a shield since he only enabled it while he was fighting.