Classic Venom

Here's the ever popular attention getter:

Venom

I don't know about the rest of you, but I've always felt let down by the official Venom figures. They just didn't fit my image of Venom. But how are toy companies meant to know what's going on in my head!? I want the moon on a stick!

My idea of Venom is from his early days. I actually first heard of Venom when I played Spider-man on the Megadrive/Genesis. So really, all I knew was that he was this deadly, black Spidey with a mouth. He seemed so sleek and deadly, so I wanted to capture that. As I learned more about Venom, it was clear that he was physically imposing so I had to capture that too. And from there, it was all about the mouth. His wicked grin in his first appearance is iconic of course, but the first comic image I saw of Venom was from when he first got his slimy tongue and distended jaw.

I've not really been a fan of Venom's evolution into a power set that seems to rely more on the morphing powers of the symbiote and all that tendril good stuff. I like my big, sleek, deadly, big mouth Spidey.

Anyway, here he is:



Venom is about 7" tall and made from a Shocker Toys The Tick figure. I bought this figure just out of curiosity and I liked the height and scale and just really wanted to try some differently engineered bodies to customise with. I changed his forearms out for SOTA Blanka's and replaced the lower legs with those from a Spider-Man Classics Stealth Venom.

I sculpted over the Tick's head and you can see some of that work in the WIP shot below.



So it's all Milliput (on top of the Tick's original head), with toothpicks for the teeth and a piece of electrical wire coated in hot glue and magnetically attached to the back of the mouth. The tongue is bendable and removable. I just noticed that I didn't take any shots of him without the tongue, but you can see that in the WIP or on my Youtube channel if you want. I am very happy with how the head came out. It's exactly the look I wanted to capture. I surprised myself with this one.

He has two sets of hands; 1 clenched in fists, and the other open claws. These are SOTA Blanka's hands but I sculpted over the nails to make sure he didn't have that detail.

The symbol on his chest and back was time consuming as it is all hand painted.





He also has 2 alternate heads.

The first is, as I mentioned above, from that iconic first appearance with the evil grin:



I wasn't too happy with how this head came out, but I don't intend to display him with that head most of the time. I found it hard to capture the kind of bulbous, cartoony grin in three dimensions, but I think I took a good shot at it. This head was made from the alternate head that came with the Tick.

His other head is Eddie Brock.



This is Eddie from his early appearances. He had this receding hairline and wicked, thick, black eyebrows (despite his golden blonde hair). I rooted through my fodder box for a long, long time, but just couldn't find any ML or DCUC, or even SOTA heads that looked right on that thick neck. Finally I came across a figure that I'd not given a second glance to since I got it in a job lot auction, the Hulk Movie Punching Hulk:



This head was exactly the right size to suit the neck and body. The face was detailed enough to look serious but not emotion specific enough to be angry. I had to resculpt the brow and the hair and of course, repaint it, but I couldn't believe my luck when I found this in the fodder box.

I hope you guys like him. Despite not being fond of the symbiotes and the evil Spider-men as characters... I sure do seem to make a lot of figures of them. I think they're neat designs make good figures, even if they don't translate into particularly great characters for stories.

Post

My next custom is this big bruiser:

POST





Post was an X-men villain who also ran as one of the Heralds of Onslaught. I don't pretend to understand what his mutant powers are, or why he's called Post. I just assume it's all down to him being a product of the 90's.

His size fluctuated in his few comic appearances, but I was asked to make him more in line with his first appearance in X-men #50 where he was shown to be able to grip Cyclops in one hand. So I went ahead and used the Marvel Legends Icons Hulk as the base figure. I did think of using Pitt, but I'd worked with him before, wanted something new, and just generally didn't think his proportions didn't suited Post.

I cut and sanded all the unwanted detail from Hulk and resculpted the lower face. The goal was to capture a kind of sadistic grin and I was happy with how it came out.





A major part of Post's look is his rocky, plated body. I looked for lots of corner cutting ways to get this done, but in the end had to just get down to it and sculpt the rocks. I had to be careful to test, at every stage, that the rocks weren't impeding the articulation.







With the rocks out of the way I moved on to working on his weapons. Post has all kinds of heavy weapons that usually arrange themselves around his shoulders. I tried initially to do this with magnets, but the weapons were too heavy for the concealed magnets, so I went with using pegs and sockets. They are all interchangeable so can be arranged in pretty much any sequence. The weapons themselves are from all kinds of sources, from GI Joe to MacFarlance fodder.






The last things to tackle were the floating plates that surround him. I'm not quite up to the level where I can enchant my customs to defy gravity, so had to make do with clear plastic rods to hold the plates up. Rather than have the plates be solid clay, I sculpted around plastic spoons. I asked the customer what 5 X-characters he would like to appear on the plates, and he chose Savage Wolverine, Cable, Onslaught, Dark Beast and Holocaust. So I printed out images of these characters (trying to get them all done by the same artist to maintain a consistent style) and glued these to the plates. I then hand painted the circuit effect around them.













And that's Post. A hard slog, but that goes with the territory of making a big figure. You can always check him out in more detail on my Youtube channel.