[Monte Williams]

Quote:

Originally Posted by tt8l

Glad to see your new thread. Your old thread was such a great source of ideas and just fun to look at. I remember some of your old pics made me go out and hunt down a Mcfarlane Quartz figure because you made it look so cool and now I have a half dozen or so of the old Mcfarlane figures.

That is immensely flattering, sir, thank you!

[Monte Williams]

Coming Soon: Tiger Force Clutch! I have a portrait of him ready to go, but I only put him together because I am impatiently awaiting the arrival of the non-Tiger-Force body I intend to use as my standard Clutch, assuming its compatible with the head I'm using. I'll share both standard and OG Clutch together when the time comes.

In the meantime...

First off, cross-posted from a survey thread about the Shooter figure:

I just got Shooter in the mail yesterday, and I'm quite smitten. I also got the Night Force Falcon and Quarrel two-pack, but I can't get past the silliness of Scarlett and Quarrel's leotard, so I'll use Quarrel's head in some other context, and in the meantime I gave some of her accessories (and one of Tiger Force Tripwire's armor pads) to Shooter (who I'm planning to rename; the origin of the name is cute and amazing, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a rather boring codename.)

Moving on, Spirit is infiltrating Springfield:

The town that's serving as Springfield in the photo above recently repainted its water tanks from their ugly, industrial color to something that can serve as a tribute to the Native community that was here first, so naturally I had to use said tanks as a backdrop for more Spirit portraits:

Finally, I took Skinwalker out for some New Year's portraits:

[Ponygt50]

Great stuff! Welcome back!

[Monte Williams]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ponygt50

Great stuff! Welcome back!

Thank you!

I went on a nice four-hour shoot today in a wilderness area I'd never visited before. Hell of a morning!

Here are some of the many, many Adventure Team photos I captured:

[flashtronaut8]

Skinwalker looks cool. I have that same figure set. If you turned the Lone Ranger into a Cobra, based on rumors about the actor, guess you could call him Skin-Eater. :\ The pairing of the water tower w/Spirit works well, but I keep thinking about how your pics of TF Outback make him look more practical than (most of) the indoor shots I've seen of him. I also like how less jacked he looks beside your Outback Hulk. Good stuff!

[Monte Williams]

Thank you, flashtronaut8, for the kind words. That was a heck of a shoot.

...and so was yesterday's shoot at Linda Falls!

First up, I drilled out my old McFarlane Toys Voodoo Queen head to add it to Shooter to try to emulate the badass crew Lonzo Wilkinson put together:

I'm calling her Ghost.

Wilkinson shared his customs in some Joe groups on Facebook, but basically it's a bunch of badass soldiers with face paint, plus a robot and an ape. How could I not love that?

Speaking of which:

I'm working on a robot, too, modeled pretty much exactly on Wilkinson's example, which utilizes a Star Wars Black K-2SO and which would seem to have been inspired by G.I. Robot from Creature Commandos. I'll photograph mine soon, just need to put some finishing touches on it first.

In the meantime...

Having run afoul of plant monsters and reptile people and finally zombies, the Joe team had to recruit some new members who are experienced at combatting the supernatural, even if they otherwise don't fit the criteria for military discipline.

Meet Ash Williams; Codename Boomstick:

Next up, this here's Southpaw, a lazy kitbash from a decade or so ago:

I share him for context, as I am trying to create a new take on him in the Classified scale, along with a new character I'm calling Calamity Jane, since we already have a Wild Bill:

Happy coincidence that I'd shoved an Avengers Cube into the hand attachment of my 1:18 Southpaw kitbash; Calamity Jane is wielding the gauntlets from Marvel Legends Black Panther Shuri, which have a very similar-looking energy attachment!

Some new portraits of Skinwalker, who is now part of Ghost's squad:

Incidentally, I've had in the back of my head for days the notion that Skinwalker is in a heavy metal band. And I decided early on that he is Navajo, if only because the Skinwalker is a Navajo concept.

Imagine my happy surprise, then, when the YouTube algorithm threw a video about Navajo "Rez Metal" at me. Best of all, many of its practitioners wear face paint not unlike Skinwalker's. Too cool.

And since I mentioned Creature Commandos, I bought a McFarlane Toys Arkham video game two-pack that includes a goofy blue-faced Batman and this bonkers repaint of Solomon Grundy, which I'm using as Doctor Phosphorus:

I normally don't care for transparent figures, but this one is pretty great. It is difficult to stop myself from getting too heavy-handed with the editing effects in portraits of this figure, simply because he looks like nothing else in my collection:

To close, here are some shots of my work-in-progress crew inspired by Lonzo Wilkinson's customs:

[Monte Williams]

Geek Creek Presents... Affordable G.I. Joe Classified Clutch!

If you, like me, missed out on the $100 Classified Vamp with Clutch and don't want to pay the $250-$300 the set is commanding on the secondary market, pop a McFarlane Toys Dune Stilgar head onto a G.I. Joe Classified Grunt body (or Tiger Force Tripwire; I was impatiently awaiting the arrival of my Grunt!)

(In two of the portraits in this post, Clutch is wearing NECA Doc Brown's tool belt, but obviously that's optional.)

An earlier version of McFarlane's Stilgar is available on Amazon for less than thirteen bucks, although I can't vouch for it 'cause I don't own that one and it's from McFarlane's wave in support of the first film, whereas mine is from a four-pack based on the sequel. The four-pack is $56 on Amazon at the moment, and it's worth it regardless of your feelings about Dune; the figures look great and photograph magnificently, with some neat cloth goods accessories.

Meanwhile, Grunt is less than twenty bucks via big Bad Toy Store.

My Grunt looks older and more filled-out than Hasbro's, but to me that's a feature, not a bug; I like the Classified Clutch a lot, but to my eye, he looks too clean and pretty to suit the character. Your mileage may vary.

[Diablogunner]

Very cool, and love the model car VAMP. Great use of those little cars. I had the original set way back in the day.

[Monte Williams]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diablogunner

Very cool, and love the model car VAMP. Great use of those little cars. I had the original set way back in the day.

Thank you, sir! A good friend sent me a pack or two of those mini-vehicles a while back. At the time, my Joe fandom was at a low ebb, so I anticipated that I would only ever use them as fodder in my TMNT sewer diorama. I'd kinda forgotten about them, so I was giddy when I stumbled across the wee Vamp.

Meanwhile, I've got a few new things to share...

First up, my first ever Operation: Monster Force figure arrived last week: The Crimson Moon Sleepwalker!

Last night, I conducted a bunch of hasty head-swaps on him, but I haven't captured proper portraits of them yet; today, I just wanted to capture simple shots of each of the three heads he comes with.

And man, I am mightily smitten. Here's what I wrote about the figure on Facebook:

If Mezco?s One:12 Collective series didn?t utilize cloth goods, this is what it would feel like. I honestly prefer this figure to most if not all of the Mezco One:12 figures I?ve owned.

The construction, tolerances, quality control, and paint apps are the greatest I have ever seen in this scale. (Seriously: SO MANY DETAILED PAINT APPS.)

The accessories are gorgeous, intricate, and solid as hell, putting the bendy Hasbro bullshit to shame. (My only issues with the accessories thus far are that it?s sometimes difficult or counterintuitive to plug cables into ports and such, and that, like Mezco at their best, the accessory allotment is simply a bit overwhelming, although naturally that?s a good problem to have.)

I don?t know how deep I?ll be going with Monster Force; only a handful of the designs *really* call to me, and while they feel worth the nearly $40 asking price (unlike Action Force), that?s still prohibitively expensive when one considers amassing an entire collection.

But if money were no object, I?d be all in, and it?s possible I will be eventually regardless.


Moving on, I started looking at my Classified Joes and wondering which of them I might perhaps utilize in a Monster Force context, and Major Bludd immediately jumped out at me:

I may never properly develop this into a narrative, nor even a series of photos, but I have a notion in mind that the G.I. Joe team was dispatched to deal with a threat, which turned out to be a bunch of monsters... who wiped out the Joes completely, with the result that the world's only hope, ironically, is Cobra.

All I've written (and I may never expand on the idea beyond this short excerpt) is this exchange, wherein I haven't even decided the identity of the person asking the question:

Q: So... are you called Monster Force because you hunt monsters, or because you are monsters?
Major Bludd: Yes.


Finally, I also got my first Valaverse Action Force figure last week: Sgt. Slaughter, which I bought less because I wanted a Slaughter figure and more because it was on sale for twenty bucks at Big Bad Toy Store and I wanted to satisfy my curiosity about the Valaverse figures.

I wasn't nearly as satisfied with Slaughter as I was with the Sleepwalker; various aspects of its production and design irk me. (I am nonetheless disappointed that I did not buy Pandora from BBTS before she sold out.)

I particularly disliked the ugly clutter at the shoulder joints, visible within the gaps to accommodate the arms. And I was fretting that I wouldn't be able to find a replacement head that would match the tone of all that exposed skin (I really didn't want to utilize him as Slaughter)...

But this lazy kitbash solved both those issues and helped me incorporate TMNT into my Joe team:

G.I. Jones!

More soon, hopefully.

[flashtronaut8]

I'm glad you had a good experience with O:MF!