Action figures have long been a perfect compliment to comic books, since every kid (or kid at heart) has that natural desire to act out adventures with their favorite heroes off the drawn page. Every so often, a unique style of figure comes along that breaks the mold, so to speak. Each Saturday, Donny B will be showcasing various offerings from Art Asylum’s take on the ‘block figure’, with a weekly spotlight on Minimates.
Henchmen are a staple of comic escapades. The hero needs a challenging fight before taking down the main villain, and what better way to provide that challenge than for the villain in question to hire, build, brainwash or genetically engineer a small army of goons?
When producing each wave of Marvel’s Minimate releases, Art Asylum plans out 6 distinct characters, with a 7th short-packed character as a variant (to appease the hard core collectors who enjoy the thrill of the hunt). Since all of Marvel’s waves (not including 4-character boxed sets or the relatively new trend of Toys R Us exclusive releases) are a standard set of four 2-packs, this inevitably results in the variant being packaged with a repeat character. Before long, a cry arose among collectors for this duplicate spot to be used as a chance for buyers to build armies of uniformed characters. The options were abundant, with available henchmen like Hydra, Hand Ninjas, even Sentinels being high on many wish lists.
Art Asylum listened, and in wave 25, we were given our first chance to build armies with the release of the A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics) Soldier.
Behind the Image:
This photo required no Photoshop work aside from cleaning up some dust here and there. The real challenge of this image was getting all of those little punks to stay where I put them. You wouldn’t believe how many times one unguarded hand motion would knock down a single A.I.M. Soldier, which would in turn set off a domino effect and demolish 20 minutes of prep work. Still, This was probably one of my more enjoyable Minimate photo shoots to date.
On Ebay: A.I.M.
This is my favorite one, yet! How many of those guys do you have?
Comment by Doorman — May 31, 2010 @ 1:00 pm
At present, I have 28 A.I.M. soldiers. I would likely have had many more than that by now if they were a bit easier to find, and if AA hadn’t followed up with so many other awesome army builders since then…
Comment by Donny B — May 31, 2010 @ 1:58 pm
[…] wanted to take this image back to the formula I used for the A.I.M. soldiers (Minimate Spotlight #4), and it was a whole lot of “fun” … okay, no, it wasn’t. It took me 2 hours […]
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