My Custom Mods [mod 22-23]: STATURE and Super Rare WASP

Sorry again for blowing my deadline last week! To make up for it, here’s a double feature of girls from the 2007 AVENGERS set who got makeovers.

First up is the big girl I promised: Stature of the Young Avengers.

She doesn’t look really great in photos. Even in hand she’s not so glamorous. Maybe it’s because she’s part of a fairly exclusive club of HeroClix sculpts based directly on an image from the comics.

 

Seriously. Hold the Stature figure at this same angle and you'll see it for sure.

 

Wonderful art by Jim Cheung from Young Avengers # 5 or 6 or something. But what looks great in Cheung’s 2D style wound up looking less-than-glorious in 3D. And besides, the costume’s wrong. By the time she chose the Stature codename (over Ant-Girl), she was wearing this:

…and has been ever since. So here’s what I did to make this big girl right:

  • Repainted her costume details with acrylic paint. Specifically, I swapped her suit’s color palette: red to black and dark-blue to red.

Completed early 2009.

Simple, huh? :) A nice side effect of the mask is that it covers up those unattractive-in-3D furrows in her angry brow.

___

Stature wasn’t the only chick in AVENGERS to need work on her face. Here’s the original look of Super Rare WASP from the same set:

 

I call her Crash Test Dummy Wasp.

 

Terrible, huh? Doesn’t look a thing like this little beauty.

It was only made worse by the announcement of the then-new 60-figure sets made that spring. The brand manager at the time declared that Super Rare figures would be of markedly higher sculpt quality than the other rarities. Common rarity pieces in particular would be cheaper, lower-quality single-mold pieces.

In reality, though, all four of the “old-school Avengers” characters in the set — Hawkeye, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch and Wasp — are cheaper, lower-quality single-mold pieces despite their Super Rarity. (I’m convinced they were intended to be Commons but got moved to the Super Rare slots late in the game.)

Anyway, Wasp is by far the worst of the lot, both in playability and sculpt quality. So when I lost her sculpt in the washout that also claimed my original Aquaman mod, I wasn’t too perturbed…I knew I could get a replacement for just a few bucks.

And I did shell out those two bucks because I’d always intended to give Janet Van Dyne a proper face:

  • Painted in eyes, eyebrows, lipstick with acrylic paint and drawing ink.

 

Photo by Antonio Cade.

 

 

...and my photo.

 

These pictures don’t do her justice at all.

Next week: One more AVENGERS Super Rare repainted.

Next post: Either a Runaways battle report or DC Alternate Team Ability cards with art!

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