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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.

The loyal minions of super-villains such as the Red Skull and Baron von Strucker, HYDRA Agents are bent on world domination through terrorist attacks and dangerous experimental technologies… What better characters could you ask f0r when making Minimate army builders? And the really cool part about these particular ‘mates is that they’re designed with two distinct looks. Depending on which accessories you use, you can either have an old school HYDRA Agent, or a more modern version!

Behind the Image:

No photoshopping on this image – just some straight up photos with fun lighting 🙂

On Ebay: HYDRA

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.

Benjamin J. Grimm, A.K.A. “The Ever Lovin Blue-Eyed Thing” has had many Minimate incarnations over the years. From the very basic Minimate body, to power-house chest pieces, to all-out sculpted parts completely covering the Minimate body, Thing has been given all the different style treatments that Art Asylum have implemented over the years. This week, we’re taking a look at one of the very first releases Minimate collectors were given – ‘Clobberin Time Thing’

Behind the Image:

This was a simple photograph, just like the Picard and Steel photos from previous posts – just a Minimate in front of a computer screen. No photoshop work required.

On Ebay: Thing | Fantastic Four
On AtomicAvenue: Thing | Fantastic Four

and now a word from our sponsor….

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.

Several weeks ago, I showcased one of my more recent attempts at creating a custom Minimate. This week, I’m putting the focus on the custom work of another artist with an image of a hand-made Darkclaw Minimate.

This masterpiece was made by Fujis (of Minimate Headquarters fame), and expertly recreates the Amalgam of Wolverine and Batman into Minimate form.
Since all of the characters in the Amalgam Universe share a license between Marvel Comics and DC Comics, getting through the red tape in order to produce toys of those properties would be a logistical nightmare. So if you want to see a Minimate of a character like Darkclaw, your only realistic bet is to create (or commission) a custom.

And as far as custom Minimates go, I’d have to say that this one matches whatever a professional company could produce! 

Behind the Image:

Since Fujis did such a standup job creating this custom, I wanted to go a bit overboard in how I produced the image that showcased his work.
I set the ‘mate on top of a toy building, arranged some red lighting, took the photo, and then went nuts adding effects (namely the sky and the fog) in photoshop.

On Ebay: Amalgam, Darkclaw

On AtomicAvenue: Amalgam, Darkclaw

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.

Well, the Thor movie is out and rocking the box office. I think that garners one last look at the Thor Moviemates, don’t you? 😉

We’ve spent a few weeks looking at various Minimate offerings based on the film’s portrayal of the main characters, which Art Asylum took great care in producing. It was tough narrowing down which figures to do features on, since just about all of them were extremely well made.
In the end, I decided to showcase the most prominently fantastic looking releases (leaving out Civilian Thor, Jane Foster, and Agent Coulson, among others) … and so, to wrap up our 4 week-long spotlight on the Thor Moviemates, here is none other than Sir Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Thor’s super powerful daddy: Odin.

Behind the Image:

Here’s my first Thor Moviemate image that isn’t a straight-forward-photograph. I actually tried doing this as a non-photoshopped project, but I couldn’t get it to work right. So in the end, I placed Odin on a sheet of yellow construction paper, took a pic, and then superimposed it onto the background image, which I pulled off the internet. It took like 5 minutes 😉

On Ebay: Thor
On AtomicAvenue: Thor

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.

Check it out – one year ago, I began my weekly Minimate Spotlight articles here at Cyberspace Comics!

I kicked off that first entry with a photo showcasing the two lead characters from Iron Man 2, which happened to have its theatrical release that weekend. As it would happen, coinciding with the one year anniversary of Minimate Spotlight is the release of Marvel’s Thor movie. So to commemorate both of those events, I decided to pay homage to myself (because I’m just that awesome, apparently) and ‘duplicate’ the format of that first photo.

Behind the Image:

I love macro mode and utilizing lighting/shadows. I’ll be the first to admit that I know very little about the professional side of photography, but using what little I do know makes photography loads of fun.
Again, this photo required no photoshop work aside from cleaning up little specs of dust and the like.

On Ebay: Thor
On AtomicAvenue: Thor

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.

Last week, we looked at the Frost Giant army builders. This week, we’re looking at the other army builder in the Thor Moviemates release: The Asgardian Royal Guards.
But the guards by themselves are a bit boring, so I threw in two of the bigger guns in the Asgardian army: Volgstagg and Lady Sif. These two characters were released in a TRU exclusive 2-pack, and rumor has it, they will be accompanied by the remaining Warriors Three in a future TRU exclusive release.

Behind the Image:

This was extremely straight forward. I found an image of the Asgardian throne room from the Thor movie, printed it out, stuck it behind the minimates, arranged the lighting, and took the photo.
Setting everything up was a bit time consuming, but the process of taking the photo couldn’t have been more simple. Chalk up another win for macro mode 😉

On Ebay: Thor
On AtomicAvenue: Thor

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.

With the Thor movie coming up, Art Asylum has released a large number of Thor Moviemates to cover just about every main character featured in the film.
Following the formula that DST has seemingly ‘perfected’ for marketing their movie tie-ins, we have been given one full wave of all the main characters, along with a few TRU exclusives, and one “army dump” of single-packs. The army dumps usually have 3 or 4 different “hench men” and maybe an important character or two. The Iron Man 2 army dump included the different assault drones, plus a “short packed” Justin Hammer.
The Thor army dump gave us some Asgardian Royal Guards, 2 different versions of Frost Giants, and the short packed Laufey (King of the Frost Giants) and Selvig.

For this week’s Minimate Spotlight, we’re looking at the fan favored Frost Giants (with Laufey leading the pack):

Behind the Image:

I 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 to get them all into position, because, just like with the A.I.M. soldiers, one wrong movement would cause a domino effect and I’d have to start from scratch. And I literally only took one photo because the second after I hit the shutter, all 26 Minimates fell over. I was too frustrated to begin again – but fortunately, the one photo I took was good enough 😉

On Ebay: Thor
On AtomicAvenue: Thor

coming soon

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.

Accessories do a great deal to make a figure awesome, especially when they showcase a character’s unique powers or abilities.
Over the years, Minimate fans have been given a few different versions of Reed Richards, A.K.A. Mr. Fantastic – and if there is any one character who can benefit from creative accessories, it’s Reed! His first release came packed with elongated arms that could bend to shape, and later releases also threw in a base to simulate the lower half of his body wrapping around an adversary. It’s details like these that make Minimates truly fun!

Behind the Image:

How many different ways are there to photograph toys? I’d rather not get myself stuck in one or two specific approaches when it comes to presenting images of Minimates, so every once in a while I try something a little different. With this image, I went for a sort of ‘vintage painting’ feel.
I google’d a painting that I felt had the right tone, and then superimposed a photo and messed around with some color/texture filters to get it to look as if it belonged with that background.

On Ebay: Fantastic Four
On AtomicAvenue: Fantastic Four