Marmot Custom Works

Dr. Mid-Nite is one of my favorite Golden Age designs; the goggles, tunic, buccaneer boots, and flared gloves all give him a kind of pilot/sky pirate look that I’m fond of.

I’m grouping these cats together because I wouldn’t necessarily describe either of them as “customs”, since they’re just straight up “same figure, same character, slightly better if un-professionally applied paint job”.

Here it’s JLU Green Arrow, given a more Alex Toth/Super Friends paint job, as opposed to the drab olive the original came with. Old school Ollie, with the Van Dyke, trick arrows, and endless grousing, is one of my favorite superheroes.

Red Tornado...uh, has a good look, especially with a few more paint applications, but that character is about as boring as watching said paint dry. Ma Hunkel 4 life. Anyway, I gave him blue gloves and boots and blacked out his eye and mouth slots.

So, there was a toyline, right, from the WWE (then the WWF), that was called...and I swear to god I’m not making this up...Maximum Sweat.

It was called this because its gimmick was “here are extremely exaggerated, some might say maximized, versions of our Superstars, and also they come with a little pump you can use to make them sweat tap water”.

No, I don’t know who thought it was a good idea either.

Did some charcuterie in both my internship and my actual Charcuterie class this week:

- Chicken galantine: so, you debone a chicken, leaving the skin whole. Traditionally, you turn everything but the breast meat into a forcemeat with fat and garnish, but my chef had me make a separate forcemeat and roll the entire chicken around it, resulting in a MASSIVE galantine that’s half chicken, half forcemeat (garnished with ham, pistachios, and truffles, in this case). It’s then poached in a chicken stock (you can make this with the bones from the chicken with smaller galantines; full utilization, y'all).

Anyway, this was a single slice out of a foot-long log.

- Venison terrine plate: so, the way my weekly, two-day charcuterie class works is that Day 1, each team makes a product (in our case, venison terrine), and Day 2, features it in individual plates. These plates are meant to be small portions, a la a 15 course meal, and built around a flavor profile (compatible flavors, spices, and ingredients found in a region, during a season, etc.).

We did a venison terrine (a molded forcemeat with garnish folded in, and a jacket of some thin product) this week: ground venison and fatback with folded in shittake mushrooms and brandy-plumped golden raisins, jacketed in collard greens.

For my plate, I went with a British Midlands profile; venison immediately made me think of Robin Hood walking around with the king’s deer on his shoulders, Nottingham led me to the greater Midlands, etc. So beside the venison, we have:

Cover Girl’s one of my favorite Joes; I feel like nine-tenths of action-team stories would’ve gone “oh, a former supermodel’s on the team? She’s gotta be a spy, or an assassin, or something involving feminine wiles”, but someone at Hasbro (presumably Larry Hama) was just like “nope! She drives a tank! It’s called the Wolverine, and it fires like eighty million rockets and is a convertible!“.

“Supermodel who defends human freedom by driving a convertible tank” is pretty core to “things I like about the GI Joe  concept”, basically.

More older work: a JLU version of Black Canary. “Didn’t they make that?” you ask. “They did, and it was not-great”, replies I.

So, here’s a weird one:

In the same way I needed a “not-puke-green” Toki for my HnK collection, I thought my shelf would be better off with a manga-accurate Mamiya, as opposed to the “where-did-they-get-THAT-outfit?” job Kaiyodo did.

This was the early-aughts, so the HnK reference material available online was thin on the ground, and most of it had Mamiya being a redhead (a la the cartoon), which...well, yay redheads, in general, but she’s supposed to be the (almost) spitting image of Yuria, no? 

I ended up finding a manga color spread and/or tanko cover or two that had her with dark black/brown hair and a white outfit, so I just went with that, more or less. Little bit of Citadel Shadow Grey for contrast, although I almost wish I’d kept that metallic teal from the original.

The mini-Mamiya is for one of the HnK gashapon lines (that I still want to write tabletop game rules for) and is a mish-mosh of adult Lynn and spare Yuria bits, which I then gave a paint job to match my earlier work.

I always say Harris/Robinson’s Starman was the comic that got me writing comics (jeez, remember how I used to write comics?), but while Jack Knight seemed like a pain the ass to try to recreate in Bruce Timm’s style, his poppa Ted lent himself well to the show’s aesthetic.

"Complete. Global. Saturation.”

Another RAH 25th style RE guy, this time intermittent series-boogeyman and king hell scenery chewer Albert Wesker, circa RE5.

Wesker here’s more or less a kitbash: GI Joe: Rise of Cobra’s The Doctor given a 25th Duke head with a paint job on the pupils (I might swap it out with a better head if I come across one; Wesker needs more striation in his slicked back hair and more of a son-of-a-bitch expression, frankly.)

Fun fact: I’ve never actually played Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, although I think the game’s sitting as a PSOne Classic on my PS3. But one of my long-term projects is to make 3 3/4 versions of most of the main RE folks, inspired partly by the original game’s “GI Joe goes to a zombie mansion” vibe.

Carlos here was the first, and just jumped out at me based on the parts I had on hand: a comic-pack Shipwreck torso, Cobra Vehicle Driver legs, Tomax arms and head, and some misc. guns and harnesses from who knows.