I hope you all had a good Christmas/New Year.
What with the break for the holidays and the frosty weather we’ve had in Britain, I’m snowed under with work (and you know… snow) so I’ll keep this update relatively short.
Just one figurine update for you but it’s quite an appropriate one – Snowbird.
Despite having a good number of appearances, the selection of Pose for this character was fairly difficult. Looking back through the comics Snowbird is most often seen flying or transforming into an animal so static standing poses are a little hard to come by. There have been a number of poses with Snowbird extending her arm but I deliberately chose not to go with these, as they would look very similar to Jean Grey’s figurine as well as a few others.
I hope you like the direction we’re going in with this figurine.
While we’re on the subject of poses I thought I’d just address a few comments about pose selections and some being repeated. We do try our best to have each figurine in a unique pose and one that is suited to the character. Obviously sometimes we don’t get this quite right. Some figurines seem to come a lot easier than others. Some characters just have workable natural poses, while others cause a lot of trouble. Although an image may look great on the comic page sometimes it just doesn’t work in 3D. Some reasons for this are that on a comic page an artist can cheat an image to make it look great – they can make the body slightly out of proportion, create slightly un-natural poses or just bleed off parts of the body that don’t quite work. Believe me, full turnarounds of comic characters are fairly rare and are never in great poses. Going from a flat image to a 3D model takes some real skill and it’s nearly impossible to match the image perfectly as it always ends up looking odd.
Another major problem with poses selected from comic pages is that the feet placement is often not shown and when it is the legs are frequently wide apart. Even a simple adjustment of narrowing the gap between the legs changes the entire pose as it moves the whole figure’s skeleton.
As some have mentioned, our collection doesn’t always have the dynamism that our sister publication (DC) does. One of the reasons for this is that when we started the Marvel Collection we were working from scratch, we didn’t know if standard poses or over the top dynamic poses were wanted. As the collection has grown we’ve tried to evolve and encompass more poses while not taking the collection too far from the original 20-30 figurines we made. On the other hand DC launched some time after Marvel and had a clean slate. Both Marvel and DC teams work closely and often duties/team members overlap so with the DC project we were able to learn from Marvel and move forward. We always consult each other on figurine development and I’d like to think both teams can learn from each other.
Now I’m not trying to defend all of the choices we’ve made but I am hoping to give you guys a little understanding of how and why we work the way we do.
I’m always happy to take suggestions for poses so if you find something you like feel free to point us in the right direction. Just remember, not everyone’s going to agree with you ;-)
Have a good weekend everyone.
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