Shortpacked!
[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
Below are the 5 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Shortpacked!" journal:[<< Previous 5 entries]
|
10:57 pm
[Link] |
We are wasting valueless time here.
Shortpacked!: Everything old is ... old again!
Ultra Car just had to comment on this eventually.
Preorders for Shortpacked! Book 2 continue!
 Phew! I'm down to the last group o' folks in this year's BotCon set. That's right, these are the Shattered Glass heroic Predacons, represented as Mini-Con redecoes. According to Razorclaw's bio information, he was once a professor at Tyrest University, and when the Autobots blew it up, he and two students retreated into the mountains to have inappropriate relations become ferocious predators.
More college professors should disappear into the mountains to become lion-dogs.
 No explanation is given for their tiny size in the "real" fiction, but I would probably adopt the April Fool's version's "shrink ray" explanation anyway, so the absence of a real story helps soothe that into my personal canon. (Annoyingly, their size in the comic ranges from "same size as everyone else" to "dinky," depending on the panel. Don Figueroa is usually more consistent than that.)
I really wish Divebomb (the bright orange bird-thing) had more paint in robot mode. Other than his head, all his paint is dedicated to his sparsely-detailed wings, which are hidden in robot mode. I think I'd love him a whole lot more if that were the case. I love him anyway, what with my orange fetish. It is, after all, a delicious Sunstorm-like orange.
The other guys are cool, too, though less orange, and are much better in the area of paint layout. They manage to get paint in both modes instead of decoing just one.
Poor heroic Decepticons. These dinky dudes are half of their rebel forces.
Tags: botcon, movies, short circuit, transformers
|
|
09:47 pm
[Link] |
BotCon 2008: WTF
In yesterday's comic, Daredevil said that Iron Man was the best movie he'd ever seen. That was, of course, a joke. Apparently some people were confused!
(Though I usually question whether Daredevil is really all that blind if he has super-insane echolocation that lets him see the shapes of everything anyway, that probably won't help much at the cinema.)
 Shattered Glass Sideswipe, Whisper (Mini-Con), Blurr, and Divebomb (not pictured) formed the BotCon 2008 souvenir set I like to call the "WTF pack." Very little here makes sense.
First of all, Sideswipe was an abandoned store exclusive of a much more interesting character. He was originally going to be a new Generation 2 Drench. But while BotCon did manage to save the toy from Cancellation Hell, they did it by making him a dude from 1984. Though they did add a buttload of more paint detail, which is appreciated, the "DRENCH" decoration on his doors was removed, which disappoints me greatly. Thank heavens that wasn't replaced with "SIDESWIPE," which means that I can at least pretend he's Drench in the privacy of my own home, albeit a Drench without his name tattooed on his sides, no Drenchy "8" racing number, and a big purple Autobot symbol.
With his dark gray, teal, and yellow, he has one of the most interesting color combinations of all the Shattered Glass toys.
 And Blurr? Oh man, don't get me started. Apparently they wanted to put Blurr in the set. Well, hey, there's this toy that already has Blurr's head. Okay, well, nobody actually likes the body that the head is on, but he has Blurr's head, so you gotta use it if you want Blurr. So guess what? They didn't like the Blurr head, so they paid cash money to give him a totally new and different Blurr head! Which begs the question why they didn't put the head on a better toy. That head coulda been on ANYTHING. This toy should not exist.
(Also, Blurr came misassembled. His crotch is upside-down. You can pop it out and put it back the way it should, but it wouldn't be BotCon without one of the toys arriving put together the wrong way.)
People say Blurr's pretty, but I don't really see it. I do like the lightning deco in car mode, but I don't find his robot mode very compelling at all, other than the new eye-patch. (The eye-patch is great.) Maybe if there were more color contrast in robot mode, instead of being almost entirely black, dark blue, and dark purple.
Bitchity bitch bitch bitch.
I'm hoping future Transformers club fiction makes these guys interesting, or I'll probably ditch them later. Sideswipe was fairly important in the comic, and I do like my army of Heroic Decepticons for some intangible reason, but Blurr did practically nothing and his bio card did him no favors. Additionally, Sideswipe has his hilarious bio card motto keeping him teetering closer to my "keep" pile: "There is only one rule now: revenge!" I'm not sure that makes sense, as I'm certain "revenge" isn't really a rule, per se, but that it doesn't make sense is amusing to me.
Again, the hints of camp save these guys. Well, they save Sideswipe. Blurr's state is pending.
Edit: Hold the presses. I forgot Blurr's quote is "The smarter I am, the faster you die." Now that's quality camp.
Tags: botcon, transformers
|
04:09 pm
![[User Picture]](http://p-userpic.livejournal.com/40204453/7420342) [Link] | I don't know anything about Casey Coller, this new Transformers artist, except that he is my new god.
Tags: batman, transformers
|
|
10:13 pm
[Link] |
Likes and dislikes
A quick reminder while I spend a few days piling through my backlog of BotCon news and new toys to pore over -- Shortpacked! Book 2 is still up for preorder! Only a handful of Shortpacked! Extras remain! And my extra set of bagged BotCon 2008 toys is still up for auction. It's at $225 and climbing!
 One of the two "souvenir" add-ons at BotCon 2008 was the set of Shattered Glass (mirror-universe) Megatron, Rodimus, and Mini-Con Rampage. IIRC, the set sold for $115 or so, which is probably the steepest price we've gotten for a BotCon souvenir add-on, though since it includes an Ultra, a Deluxe, and a Mini-Con, it's also the largest. Only 1100 of the set were produced.
I opined on Megatron the first night of BotCon, and I'm still sweet on him. He's my favorite toy of all the year's offerings, though I like his colors second only to Goldbug's. The combination of light gray, black, translucent blue, and pale red is an attractive one. Plus he has that sweet prototype Megatron head.  (Though, damn, I wish they'd interpreted it less bucket-heady. Ruins the point a little.) The smaller, Japanese version of the Energon Megatron mold is also new to me, since I have both of the larger, American versions. It's basically the same, but smaller, as one would imagine, and it's electronics-less.
I wonder if that black tank Megatron carries around with him is OTFCC'04 Megazarak. Same colors!
 Rodimus came with him, which was merely an unfortunate side-effect to me. Other than the awesome Evil Goatee, I really have no love for him. He's black and silver and purple. There wasn't much fun had with the deco; they gave him a new flame pattern. That's pretty much it. Again, the goatee is the only real twist.
More of these toys should have had goatees.
I figger I'll keep him, if only to round out the set. And there's upcoming Shattered Glass fiction coming up, written by the usually-engaging Trent Troop and Greg Sepelak. It's possible they'll get me to appreciate him for his characterization. The comic book has so far failed on that front, but it's not too late.
Tags: botcon, transformers
|
|
10:59 pm
[Link] |
SPOOOON!
Shortpacked!: Scraping the bottom of the barrel of my BotCon comics.
I drew tonight's comic first, of all of my BotCon comics, but I didn't run it because I had better ones. This morning I felt ill and I was still exhausted from my trip, so up it went. Whee, vacation.
 This comic is weaker, I feel, because it insinuates this sort of exchange actually happened. It didn't, and it is a complete fabrication. I was merely sitting in on the first panel of the con, which happened to be IDW's, fiddling with some toy as always, and felt really guilty about it, like when you doodle during class. The man berating the audience member in the strip is none other than Marty Isenberg, the head writer for Transformers Animated (and co-story editor of Beast Machines), who was truly a class act and a wonderful human being. One of the best guests we've had at a BotCon, I believe. He was funny, engaging, intelligent, and extremely happy to be there. Today's comic, though it does not specifically say the speaker is Isenberg, does him a disservice. But hey, he's who was there at the panel when I needed reference.
 Several new upcoming Animated toys were debuted at BotCon, but none were more anticipated by me than Sentinel Prime's. Visually he's, y'know, the Tick. As a Transformer. And voiced by Townsend Coleman, who is, y'know, the Tick. He's not at all characterized the same, as he's Optimus Prime's jerky rival who is a big jerk and acts like a jerk. But I love him, and I think he's my favorite Animated character.
But damn, his toy is tiny. He's a mere Deluxe, when he should be a Voyager class so he can push Prime around. And like Bulkhead and Lugnut, his toy design is very wide, so he puts all his mass into his horizontal, meaning he's actually quite short. I think he's shorter than Bumblebee, though that just was my rough estimate as the hand-painted sample in the Hasbro booth was squatting. And so I am enraged at the toy, yet I still love it because it is Sentinel Prime, my favorite character.
I'll, uh, just have to stick him in the back of my shelf so he looks... far away.
Today at Kmart I found a few cases of Indiana Jones toys on a palette. I was tempted to open them myself, since no one was around, but there's that pesky red-stamped "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 5/1/2008" all over them. So not only would that be kinda shady, but they'd inevitably not ring up at the front desk, they'd call back, and then some employee would find a half-opened box left in the aisle, and I'd totally get busted.
Oh well. I'll check back in two days. Must have.
Tags: animated, botcon, indiana jones, toy hunting, transformers
|
[<< Previous 5 entries] |
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
shortpacked's journal