It's a Special Day.

So I promised I'd have some figurine news and here it is:

We've finally sorted out the Professor Xavier fiasco!

If you've been following the saga of Prof. X on the figurine forum then you'll know a little of the history already but for those of you who haven't here's a quick breakdown.

We've always wanted to have Prof. X in the collection and he was originally scheduled for the first 60 issues, however problems with the initial sculpt led to him being delayed. We then had the problem with the size of the character, in his wheelchair he's a little too big for the regular issues but a little too small to be an outright special. So we have decided to go for a double-pack special.

This is essentially two characters on separate bases (with one shared magazine) in the same special. We really wanted the second character to have a shared history with Xavier, not just a somebody stuck in for no reason, and to be a character we probably wouldn't have in the collection unless we went way past issue 120. So, the guys on the forum have been voting frantically for over the last few weeks for their choice of character and I'm happy to say the overwhelming majority voted for Lilandra, who was actually my joint fast choice. I was also keen on Vulcan just to have the 'Third Summer's Brother'.

If you don't know who she is (shame on you), she's Professor Xavier's wife (although technically the marriage is now annulled) and former Empress of the Shiar.

Hopefully the double-pack idea will prove popular and we can add it to our list of specials (mega and regular). I'm personally very excited to see how the idea works, as it could be a great way to get some of the lesser known characters into the collection and also means that we're getting more Marvel characters into the series. For those of you worried about a shared magazine, I can assure you we'll be looking carefully at the magazine's content to make sure we have a detailed history on both characters.

I also have news of the upcoming specials, below is an image of the next regular special – the Man-Thing. He's coming out after the Sentinel mega issue (of which I'll have some images soon) and was sculpted by a very talented artist from South Africa, Aren Damiani.



And lastly I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who voted in the mega special poll. It would seem that Onslaught narrowly beat the Watcher, so I think I know what the next two mega specials will be after the Sentinel.

Keep watching this space and we'll have a regular special poll up very soon.

Rich