Off-model Avengers, assemble!

My three-year-old nephew likes Legos and he likes superheroes, and Lego makes a lot of superhero-themed play-sets. The only downside? They're awfully expensive. My sister thought she found a pretty good solution when she found a set of eight super-heroes, each with their own, individual vehicles, for sale for an extremely low price online, and so she ordered them to put in his Easter basket.

Something tells me that these might not have been completely official. While they look a lot like Legos, they don't have the Lego logo on them anywhere, and there are some...subtle differences from what one might expect to find in a set of officially-licensed and produced Avengers toys.

The first thing that struck my sister and nieces as fishy wasn't that each hero came with a vehicle, although I always think it's weird when a character who can fly like Thor has his own helicopter, or a character who is barely capable of logical thought like The Hulk, has a race car.

No, it was the fact that the vehicles came with no instructions as to how to assemble them. My eldest niece was able to find photos of them online though and then painstakingly went about assembling eight helicopters, race cars, boats and jeeps based solely on the photos of the finished products.

And then there's the fact that this Avengers line-up is a peculiar one. In addition to Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk and Thor, it features Wolverine and Spider-Man. My my sister and niece knew from the movies and cartoons that those last two didn't belong, but perhaps this toy set is reflecting the original New Avengers line-up, in which case they belong there as much as anyone else. As for what Superman and Batman are doing with the Avengers, however, your guess is as good as mine.

As you can see in the image above, Thor is wearing his movie costume, but it looks like he's dyed his beard and eyebrows a shade of red that's somewhere between burgundy and hot pink.

What's that, you ask? Is that a rifle in Spider-Man's hand in the background? Why yes it is!

In fact, both Spider-Man and The Hulk come with shotguns, just in case their super-strength and web-shooters aren't enough to get the job done. (Although, now that I look at the guns more closely, I see they both have scopes on them, so perhaps they are not shotguns after all, but some sort of high-powered sniper rifles? Okay, I can kind of see how Spider-Man's power-set, if not his morality, would make him an ideal sniper, but The Hulk? He would be the worst sniper.)

But if you think that's weird, it's certainly not as strange as Superman's accessory.

That's right, the guy with heat-vision is also packing heat, although his firearm is a handgun, which he can easily tuck into the belt holding up his red underwear.

Finally, here's Wolverine, who, like Thor, came with a helicopter that he can't actually fit inside.

He's the best there is at what he does, and what he does is ride balance on the tail of his helicopter, wearing a yellow outfit with green stripes on it.

You can't fool me, Jean-Paul Valley.

The packaging you're hiding in may be labeled "ACTION WING BATMAN," but I know you're not really any kind of Batman, Azrael.

Well these are pretty cool.

I was a in a toy store this weekend, picking up a very large gift that my sister had ordered for my nephew but didn't want to pay for postage one (But shhh! Don't tell him! It's supposed to be from Santa!). Anyway, me being me, before I picked that up, I spent about two hours wandering the toy store, looking at, well, everything.

Star Wars stuff is still ridiculously omnipresent. Both Transformers and, in particular, G.I. Joe seemed to be on the wane. There was a bit of superhero stuff, but Guardians of the Galaxy toys accounted for the vast majority of it. And there was a surprising amount of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys there, I suppose the Nickelodeon cartoon and the live action movie made for multiple reasons to stock toy store shelves with Turtles toys (although most of them seemed associated with the cartoon, not the film).

Anyway, I was kind of surprised and delighted to see the above figures. These are "Original Comic Book Leonardo" and "Original Comic Book Michelangelo"*. There were also "Original Comic Book" versions of Donatello and Raphael.

They are basically exactly what they sound like, toys based on the Turtles as they appeared in the original comic book, rather than in any of the cartoons or movies that followed, each with a red headband, no distinguishing initial on their belts and so on.

You probably can't see all that well in this shoddy cellphone image, but there appears to be some scoring on them too, as if to suggest cross-hatching.

It's a pretty neat idea. Sure, it might have been neater if they were black-and-white, but whatever; I would have been fascinated with these in junior high, and would have wanted to buy 'em in high school (If you look at the art on the packaging, that appears to be a Peter Laird penciled image of a ninja turtle, or someone drawing in Laird's style.

They came sold in two different ways. You could get just the figure for something like $7 or $8, I think, or you could get the figures packaged with a comic book for $14. The comics are the one-shot "micro-series" featuring each Turtle, from the original Mirage run, although these seem to be the IDW reprints of the same...in fact, you can see the IDW logo on the covers (Huh, I wonder if they're colorized or in the original black-and-white...?).

I imagine those comics, should they fall into the hands of children, would have the potential to blow some young minds. The Michaelangelo and Donatello ones are innocent enough. The 1985 former is called "The Christmas Aliens," and features Mikey busting some criminals who have hijacked a truckload of that year's must-have Christmas toy, the 1986 latter is Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's most direct Jack Kirby tribute, as Don meets a cartoonist named "Kirby" who has a magical crystal that allows whatever he draws to come to life (these are mostly crazy, Kirby-esque mechanical/organic creatures).

But the Raphael and Leonardo issues are pretty hardcore. The former, also from 1985, begins with a scene in which Raphael loses his temper so badly with Michaelangelo while sparring that he nearly murders him with a wrench and then, when going out to cool off, he meets insane vigilante Casey Jones, and the pair bond by beating the hell out of each other.

The latter, from 1986, is one of the most visually accomplished, dramatic and action-packed issues of the original run. Entitled "What Goes Around...Comes Around," it's the only one of the four that has more folks credited than just Eastman, Laird and letterer Steve Lavigne. [Stephen] Bissettem, [Michael] Dooney, [Jim] Lawson and [Ryan] Brown are also credited, although it's hard to tell who did what, as is so often the case with early Mirage comics.

The narrative is split into two, with one strand featuring Leonardo out in the snow alone, fighting and killing his way through a gauntlet of Foot ninjas and the other featuring April and the other three turtles at home in her apartment, decorating the tree and beginning to celebrate Christmas. The fight scenes are much more textured and inked and shaded, while the celebration scenes are brighter and whiter and slightly less detailed (If I had to guess, I'd guess Lawson penciled the celebration scenes and either Brown and/or Eastman finished them, while the Leonardo scenes look like everyone might have had a hand in them).

Anyway, it's about 30 straight pages of ninja fighting, ending with a bloodied and beaten Leonardo being thrown through the apartment window in a three-panel, slow-motion sequence—"KER- RASS- SHHH!"—and laying on the floor gasping...

Kind of a down note to end on, huh? Oh, and good luck finding  an issue of the 28-year-old "T.M.N.T. #10!!!" kids! (If you do manage to track it down in an IDW reprint or collection of some kind,  it's, like, the ultimate low point in TMNT history. That's another issue-long fight, in which The Shredder and The Foot Clan break into April's apartment, beat the shit out of everyone and burn the place to the ground, with only the timely intervention of Casey Jones allowing our heroes to flee to safety in Northampton, where they will remain in hiding from their enemies for 12 issues or so. At that point the Turtles return to New York to kill a bunch of Foot ninja and re-kill The Shredder.)

I looked on the back of the box to see if these four figures were part of a whole line of toys based on the original comics—I'd love toys of Dave Sim's Cerebus, Renet and Savanti Romero or the Turtles with their pre-teen variant weapons from #9!—but no dice.

Still, it's nice to see toys so closely based on the original designs out there for mass consumption and, especially, mid-1980s, independent comics attached to many of them, primed to blow the minds of any kids who read them and, hopefully, set them upon the path of discovering the original TMNT comics and, through them, the world of comics in general. Eastman and Lairds' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was one of my original gateway comics, and look where I am today!

...

On second thought, maybe that's not such a good thing...



*Fun fact: Michaelangelo's name was "Michaelangelo" originally because, despite the fact that Splinter named his four sons after favorite Renaissance artists, Eastman and Laird misspelled "Michelangelo," adding an extra "a" where one didn't belong. I know that in in volume 4 of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Peter Laird-helmed Mirage series that was published right up until about the time he sold the characters to Nickelodeon, he changed the spelling to "Michelangelo," thus fixing his mistake...and, incidentally, retconning the spelling of the character's name about 20 years too late. I'm honestly not sure how it's typically spelled now in various merchandise and media—I could pull an IDW trade off my bookshelf and do some Internet research if I wanted to know terribly badly, I suppose—but on the toy packaging it's spelled "Michelangelo," the correct spelling of the name of the artist he's named for. But if you notice the cover of the comic book behind the figure, it's spelled as Eastman and Laird originally spelled it, "Michaelangelo."

Spider-Man is a go-go head.

My 22-month-old nephew was in my bedroom at my ancestral home this morning, and spotted this little Spider-Man toy I bought on a whim from a vending machine in a movie theater lobby a few years ago. He immediately pointed at it and exclaimed "Go-go," his word for a basketball, which is one of his favorite things in the world.

When he was handed the toy, he handled it curiously for a few moments, seemingly unsure what to make of Spider-Man's body. His older sister grabbed it, snapped the head in half (the toy came in three parts), removed the body, and then re-snapped the head back together.

Seeing this, my nephew's eyes lit up and he clapped with excitement, "Go-go!" He then proceeded to carry Spider-Man's perfectly round head around the remainder of the visit, clutching it in one hand and a small plastic ball in the other. Both of these he threw to various family members and tried (and failed) to catch when they threw them back to him,

Obviously, the toy design has purposely exaggerated the size of Spidey's head in relation to his body, but I guess I never realized just how much Spidey's head looks like a basketball until today.

Apparently, Batman is the most delicious.

My father recently purchased these adorable little toy cars for my 10-month-old nephew, who doesn't realize just how lucky he is. I had to wait until I was in grade school until I had access to toys based on DC's superheroes!

So far, he doesn't seem too terribly interested in discussing superheroes with me. He doesn't even make eye contact when I try to explain to him how silly it is for Superman to drive a car, since Superman can fly (And I don't think it's not just because my nephew's a baby; my father is just as disinterested in my correcting him every time he refers to Green Lantern as Green Arrow or The Riddler).

At this point, my nephew mainly just sucks on their heads.

Batman is his favorite, but I'm assuming that he's basing his preference on the fact that maybe the black plastic tastes the best, or that perhaps Batman's slightly-pointed bat-ears feel more soothing against his teething gums than the plastic, round heads of hair on the other guys.

I'm torn.

I don't think either the main Iron Man armor that Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark wears throughout Iron Man 3 (MK 44, I think he called it...?) or the Iron Patriot armor from the movie are particularly cool-looking, and I don't think these toy versions look all that cool either, what with their big, goofy toy weapons and chunky shoulder pads.

But I nevertheless think these Assemblers toys sound super-cool, and the idea of being able to buy a bunch of Iron Man toys that you can take apart and reassemble in something I would have really wanted to get in on if I were younger. Say, 8. Or 12. Or 18. Or 28.

Meanwhile, in DC comics last week, I saw this ad:

I can't help but notice a distinct lack of Stephen Amell's naked torso in it, which was the focus of the previous ads I've seen for it in my comics.

Come on, Arrow ad-makers: Less hood, more muscles. Don't you want anyone to watch the show...?

Super Dinosaur, is that you?

I saw this on a clearance rack in the toy section of a big box retailer the other day, and thought immediately of Robert Kirkman and Jason Howard's Super Dinosaur comic.

What came first, I wonder, Super Dinosaur, or Fisher Price's T-Rex with robot arms...? Or were they both pre-dated by other, earlier T-Rexes with robot arms...? Perhaps it's one of those ideas that seems really awesome when you first encounter it, but is actually a little more common than you might expect?

Like, when I was in college, I used to always draw this snake with robot arms that I thought was an ingenious invention of my own (I used to really like drawing scales when doodling in class, so I drew a lot of snakes; this one was the archenemy of a squirrel-man who wore a tweed jacket and boots and carried .45s that I also used to draw all the time back then. I liked drawing tweed patterns as well as scales). Then one day someone saw it, asked what it was, and when I said, "Oh, it's a snake with robot arms" they responded with, "Oh, like in that one Easter special?" (I never saw that particular Easter special, but have ever since wanted to).

I later found out one of the Legionnaires from one of the various Legions of Super-Heroes was also a snake with mechanical arms.

So, you know, as with snakes with robot arms, it's likely no one necessarily owns the idea of T-Rexes with robot arms. Still, if I were Robert Kirkman and I saw that toy in the store, I might be pissed. Actually, that's not true—If I were Robert Kirkman and my personal shopper told me they saw that toy in a store, I'd probably shrug and then dive back into my pool filled with Walking Dead money...