geekent's Buy Nothing Year

Been doing my budgeting and, yup, I'm out of money, which means extra-frivolous expenses like action figures are right out. It's really too bad because the second series of Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier Action Figures is coming outnext week and they look swee-ee-eet.

But, that's just the tip of the iceberg of action figures I'll lamentably be excluding from my collection in '08. There's also the New Gods line in April (which is the closest I've ever seen Kirby's art so accurately replicated in 3-D... I'm not even a New Gods fan, but my desire to have these is a testament to how innovative still Kirby's artistic and design aesthetic remains).

As noted at the San Diego Comic Con, Hasbro has licensed the entire DC Universe for a new line of collectible figures, DC Universe Classics, which will start appearing on the shelves the first week of January (bastards). The big deal about this is they have the legendary figure sculptors The Four Horsemen working on designs (giving the figures all uniformity in style and proportions) and they will all be quite articulated. The DC Direct line of figures have been good for capturing an artist's style, like Alex Ross, Jim Lee, Kirby, etc, but when a Deadshot figure belongs to a Michael Turner line, he doesn't look very good next to a George Perez inspired Cyborg. A lot of the DC Direct figures, like the Justice Society line-up, have been ugly or awkward, with some of the most inane articulation (7 points, two of them ankles? WTF?), but with the Hasbro line, everything will be integrated visually and nicely posable. Oh, and each wave of releases will have a collect-a-figure, which the Marvel Legends series popularized, where you get a component of another figure with each figure in the line, to assemble a new one. Wave 1: a sweet-looking Metamorpho. Wave 2: Gorilla Grodd.

Toy announcements tend to come far in advance as prototypes are drummed up quite some time before they're ready for market, so we often can see figures lined up 6 (or more) months ahead of scheduled release... so expect a few more of these reports, especially since DC Classics are slated for 1 wave every quarter. Oy.