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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.

Moon Knight, a cult favorite B-list hero in the Marvel Universe, made his Minimate debut in Marvel’s 29th wave. Characters like Moon Knight, who fly under the general public’s radar, would be considered by toy makers to be one of those choices that might keep sales at a minimum. However, thanks to the bigger name characters that he was paired with in this particular wave (namely Daredevil and Wolverine), this cool looking and often requested ‘mate was able to see the light of day:

Behind the Image:

No magic photoshop work here. I was walking around a parking lot looking for spots to utilize for a unique looking shot… and I found this one underneath the wheel base of my car. Very simple, very straight forward.

On Ebay: Moon Knight

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.

Not every Minimate is welcomed with open arms. Sometimes, Art Asylum releases a character that just plain stinks. The Hulk is a prime example of this, since many of his releases are experimentations with “bulking up” the look of a Minimate without changing it too drastically. Many fans feel that his first release was the best, and every attempt to “improve” him have failed horribly… but the Hulk isn’t alone. In DC’s second Minimate outing, they introduced the larger sized bodies for appropriately larger character. On top of doing that, they added on rather encumbering pieces that hid a large amount of the distinctive blocky look that Minimates were built to embody. We are going to see that concept as we examine Gorilla Grodd.

Grodd, from the Flash’s rogues gallery, is a big character. To convey the bulkiness of his hairy physique, his Minimate form was “over dressed” as some fans would argue. It caused a small outcry from the Minimate community, many of whom had no hatred for the release aside from how it simply didn’t look much like a Minimate:

Behind the Image:

I’ve shown off several photoshop-heavy images over the last couple of weeks, so this time I went for one that had no post production work whatsoever. I wanted a very ‘organic’ feel for this week’s photo, just to keep from getting in a rut of over-producing my shots (which I am very fond of doing). And what better way to give a very ‘real’ feeling to a photo than to surround the subject in nature?

So I took my Gorilla Grodd ‘mate outside and placed him in a tree. ’nuff said 😉

On Ebay: Gorilla Grodd

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.

Longevity in the toy market often necessitates growth and experimentation. Over the years, Art Asylum has managed to infuse a steady progression of new ideas and tweaks into their approach toward Minimate design, essentially breathing new life into their releases.
Few characters provide a better comparison for this concept than Wolverine – especially when you contrast the release of his classic yellow and blue costume in the Giant Sized X-Men Boxed Set back in 2004 with the retooled approach of the same costume in Marvel Wave 28 in 2009.

Last week’s image centered attention on the original Minimate of Wolverine’s iconic look. That focus is brought to fruition here by displaying the evolved product that 5 years of AA’s artistic tweaking has produced:

Behind the Image:

Again, like last week, I wanted to produce an image that was decidedly photoshopped. This time, however, I wanted less of a “graphic design” look and more of a solid and slightly epic look.
From the beginning I imagined the compliment of Jim Lee’s masterful artwork behind the Minimate itself, but it was only through experimentation that I stumbled on the idea of fog to complete the overall feel of the image. It was simple enough to pull off, utilizing nothing more than “cloud” picture tubes and varying layer transparencies.

On Ebay: Wolverine

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.

As we saw last week, Art Asylum’s comic-based Minimates almost never deviate from the character continuity established in their respective comic books. The only exception to that rule of thumb is Batman, who received a few conspicuous costume variations in the C3 line. That aside, there have been no Minimate costume releases designed to exploit the toy market and the little kids who just want an exciting looking Spiderman, even if he’s neon green.

However, the bottom line for any toy company is the need to make a profit, and that is usually only possible to pull off with big name heroes that are guaranteed to sell. If collectors want lower profile characters that don’t have as much general appeal, they need to wade through a veritable river of the big guns that are more likely to catch the average buyer’s eye. So that raises a question – if Art Asylum literally needs to release at least one new version of Spidey or Iron Man or Hulk with every wave, how do they fill 35+ waves without fabricating new designs of those characters? Well, when the characters in question have decades worth of comic history, there is often plenty of pre-established costume diversity to tap into. And with more than 20 Minimate releases so far, Wolverine is a great example.

Left to right: New X-Men Wolverine, Gaijin Wolverine, Giant Sized X-Men #1 boxed set Wolverine, Patch Wolverine, Ultimate Wolverine

Behind the Image:

The visual approach on this one is clearly different than any of my other posts so far. I played around with a few ideas and eventually decided to utilize a very stylized feel for this image.
In order to set up for next week’s article, I wanted to center the focus here on the Giant Sized X-Men #1 version of Wolverine. In order to establish that, I placed him in the middle, made him larger than the others, and then muted the color schemes on the 4 background ‘mates.

On Ebay: Wolverine

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 all of Art Asylum’s comic book releases, they have followed one very cool rule of thumb: Every character design is based off of a comic book event, era, or even a specific artist. While a lot of toy companies try to exploit the market by producing weird (and often lame) variations of a character that he/she would never be caught dead doing otherwise (variations like “Fractal Armor Batman” or “Anti-Vampire Spiderman“), you won’t see Minimates doing that… Well, except for a couple of Batman releases in DC’s first C3 wave. Heavy Assault Batman is one such example:

Behind the Image:

Batman is a creature of the night. He looms in shadows, and avoids brightly lit areas if at all possible. And since he loves blending into the dark, he would never wear a fruity costume with purple and pink highlights.
Since this costume is a pretty intense antithesis of Batman’s true character, I figured I would follow that deviation and light this Minimate with a very bright neon color. So I grabbed an orange light for the background (which was nothing more than a wall radiator) and a normal light to shine on Batman, so that his colors weren’t washed out by the orange hues.

On Ebay: Batman

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.

Geoff Johns has spent the last few years climbing the ranks of DC Comics, and he’s gotten pretty high up. Along the way, he has influenced many different storylines and characters – most notably resurrecting Hal Jordan as Green Lantern, Barry Allen and the Flash, re-establishing the DC Multiverse, and bringing us the monumental ‘Blackest Night’ event. That’s just naming a few of the bigger things he’s had his hand in over the past few years. Well, before he made the big splashes that I listed above, he gave birth to DC Comics’ Stargirl and her robotic-suited “sidekick”, S.T.R.I.P.E. You may recognize Stargirl from her appearance on Smallville, or maybe one of the growing number of comic book storylines she’s been involved in since her creation. Or maybe you’ve seen her in Minimate form 😉

When DC Comics launched their second Minimate line, they decided to move on from the C3 concept, and embraced the idea of integrating the 2.5 inch Minimate design where it was appropriate.
Up until that time, all comic-based Minimates were one standard size: 2 inches. DC felt that certain characters needed to stand above others, and that led to the release of larger characters such as Bane, Brainiac 13, and Clayface, whose heightened stature contrasted the size of normal characters who were still 2 inches.

One of the characters who got the taller body treatment was Stargirl’s protector, S.T.R.I.P.E.

Behind the Image:

This was a really simple photo to take – I simply found an image of an American flag from Google, and then positioned the two Minimates in front of the computer screen.

On Ebay: Geoff Johns

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.

Aside from a relatively short stint at Wal Mart and Target, the only “big name” store to ever carry Minimates was Toys R Us. For the most part, the only readily available outlet for Minimates is either a local comic book shop, or one of about a dozen online retailers. This makes sense, considering the “collector toy line” nature of Minimates. They may look like they have little kid appeal (and apparently Art Asylum banks on that age group as their major demographic), but really the only people who go hard core for these toys are the more grown up collectors.

That being said, Toys R Us has gained a lot of love from the Minimate fan base, since they are the only national chain to carry Minimates (apparently they haven’t brought ‘mates to their worldwide stores just yet). But it’s not simply a bigger outlet for the same thing you could find at your local comic dealer or an e-tailer. Toys R Us has brokered a deal with Diamond Select Toys (the company who owns Art Asylum, creator of Minimates) to deliver customers “TRU exclusive” releases, such as the release of Cosmic Silver Surfer:

Behind the Image:

I wanted to give Silver Surfer the appearance of surfing through some sort of cosmic something (maybe a nebula cloud? Who knows – it’s space after all. Anything could work. Go watch an episode of Star Trek and you’ll see what I mean), but without relying too much on photoshop.

So I simply placed him inside of my car’s tailpipe, and then changed the color scheme in post production to give it a more “cold” feel.

On Ebay: Silver Surfer

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.

Though they weren’t the first company to license their characters to Art Asylum’s Minimates line, Marvel Comics was the first major comic book company to support AA, starting back in 2003. One year (and 6 waves) later, DC Comics decided to get into the game as well. Since they didn’t want their products to get lost in the shuffle, they decided to up the ante and do one better than Marvel, and so their deal with Art Asylum saw the introduction of the C3 concept (which stands for “Create, Construct, Customize“).

C3 brought Minimates one step closer to Legos, since the whole idea behind the concept was that Minimates were no longer just figures, but now they were figures that came with building block sets that were “compatible with other popular building block systems”. It was a viable marketing idea, but the problem is that Minimates were never intended to be compatible with (or compared to) Legos. As a result of this move to introduce building blocks to accompany the figures, the battle that Art Asylum had been fighting to not have their products looked at as just another “Lego knock off” took a major hit. The real unfortunate thing about this concept wasn’t the quality of the product, but rather it’s execution. Mega Blox has become a formidable competitor to Legos, if only because they have been around long enough to make a name for themselves and acquire decent licenses. C3, however, only lasted for 2 short waves, which effectively killed any chances of people taking it seriously. Still, in those 2 waves, we were given many well known (and well designed) DC characters in Minimate form.

But DC wasn’t done with the Minimate scene after C3 went under. In 2007, they signed another contract with Art Asylum, and with this new deal, they took a different approach.
The C3 line was based off of the success of the Bruce Timm helmed Justice League cartoon series, and so all of the initial DC Minimates were designed from the cartoon. For DC’s second Minimate venture, they tried appealing to a less mainstream market, with all of their designs being focused on the more serious look of the comic books.

DC’s second foray into the Minimate market had more longevity than the C3 venture, but unfortunately this approach didn’t last either. Before this line was discontinued, however, DC was gracious enough to give fans 8 waves of DC Minimates (no longer packaged with the C3 block system). The first wave saw the rerelease of Superman, in a less cartoony look. This week’s image shows the “C3 wave” version of Superman (left) standing next to the regular “DC wave” version (right):

Behind the Image:

This was pretty straight forward. I photographed the two Minimates standing next to each other against an unlit black background, and then superimposed the red “S” symbol behind them via photoshop.

On Ebay: Superman

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 upcoming Green Lantern movie is gaining steam, and Ryan Reynolds’ portrayal of DC’s lead GL (Hal Jordan) is causing a buzz. But Hal Jordan isn’t the only character in DC Comics’ library to hold the title of Green Lantern. In fact, you may be more familiar with John Stewart or Kyle Rayner, and the list doesn’t end with human Green Lanterns protecting Earth. The Green Lantern Corps stretches across the universe, boasting members from countless alien races. One such member is the four-armed Slyggiarian known as Salaak.

Art Asylum has flexed their artistic muscles many times over the years, crafting unique looks for certain characters that are very distinct, yet still clearly identifiable as Minimates. This is no exception – in fact, some argue that this one Minimate is AA’s best offering in the “non-traditional Minimate” category.

Behind the Image:

 I love playing around with Lighting. To achieve the look of this image, I used a traditional lamp, along with smaller blue and yellow lights to illuminate Salaak. For the background, I used one lamp with a green tinted bulb on a crumpled up black sheet (to give it an unusual texture). Simple, but effective.

On Ebay: Green Lantern

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.

Everyone loves a good story where the hero gets the girl, right? But what if the hero you’re rooting for falls for a girl who is forbidden? In a modern day superhero homage to Shakespearean tragedy, Marvel Comics introduced readers everywhere to the quintessential star crossed comic book couple; Gambit and Rogue.

Gambit: A Louisiana-bred ladies’ man with the ability to charge objects (he favors playing cards) that explode on impact. Since his introduction by Chris Claremont and Jim Lee into the world of the X-Men back in 1990, Gambit has cemented his place as a fan favorite hero.
Rogue: The X-Men’s southern belle, Rogue’s powers are her curse; she involuntarily absorbs the memories, physical strength, and super powers of anyone she touches. This potentially fatal power prevents her from making any physical contact with others, which creates a huge hurdle for her relationship with Gambit.

Behind the Image:

In order to give Rogue the appearance of flying, I used a Minimate flight stand, then I simply placed Gambit directly in front to cover it. The only photoshop work I did with this image was the glow effect for Gambit’s power, which was an extremely simple 2-layer process, since I only had to add some highlights to the included charged-card accessory.

On Ebay: Gambit, Rogue