Monday 24 November 2008

Round Two. Fight!


So the first round has now ended and yes, there will be some of you disappointed that your choice hasn't gotten through but don't let that put you off voting in the next round.

From some of the comments left, I can see that we all want more than one of the characters on the list and if we go with the choices that everyone has posted, I think we'd have to run the series to well over 200 issues. I see that many collectors have a favourite family/branch of the Marvel Universe; some people want every Inhuman, some want every character in the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. While we're never going to fit all Marvel's characters into the collection (they have over 2000) hopefully by doing a few of these polls everyone will be happy that we've managed to get at least one of their favs into the last 20. You never know you might discover a new favourite just by looking up those in the polls.

Oh, and if you don't know who a character is the best place to get a bio is from Marvel's official website at:

http://www.marvel.com/universe/Main_Page

So that's it from me today, go vote, the polls will close on Thursday.

Friday 21 November 2008

It's a knockout

The results are in for the latest poll and it looks like Blackheart has won the day with over 60% of the vote. All is not lost for poor old Melvin Potter, he’ll be entered into another ‘losers’ playoff poll at a later date.

As I've previously said, I’m really keen to vary the way we choose the next batch of characters, so this week I’ve decided to put up a tournament style poll. The way this will work, is that we’ll have a number of head to head polls, with the winner progressing to the next stage. The figure that wins the tournament will be put into the 121-140 list. (See diagram below for structure)

I’ve decided we’ll have two sides to the tournament, an Avengers Heroes side and an Avengers Villains side. This week we’ll start with the Heroes.

Round One will be up until Monday afternoon, so get voting.




So, while I’ve got your attention, I thought I’d see if you guys can come up with a caption for the last image in the magazine. As some of you may know, we tend to finish page 19 of the magazine with a funny image of the featured character. We’ve had a bit of a dry run with this image recently but this week Dan the designer has finally got round to putting it back in, and now he wants your help with the caption. The image is below and will be featured in Issue 93 – Valkyrie.

The caption can be for either Valkyrie or Hellcat and can be a thought or word balloon. The only limit is that it must be under 15 words. Oh and it has to be of good taste.

Please post your ideas for the word balloon in the comments section and I will announce the winner next Friday.


Friday 14 November 2008

Another Friday, another update.

Welcome back everyone; it’s good to see all the positive comments about the series being extended to 140 issues. Some have pointed out that 150 would be a nicer number and I can’t agree more, hopefully if all goes well and (in the style of Stan Lee) ‘You readers demand it!’ we’ll get another extension. Only time will tell.

Anywho, with the collection expanding it’s good to see everyone having their say on which characters they’d like included, last count I made the comments section had over 60 requests. Wow we really could go on forever.

I’ve noticed that a few of the requests are for figures we’ve already got planned so I though it might help to put the 100-120 list up here:

100 Banshee
101 War Machine
102 Hobgoblin
103 Baron Zemo
104 Taskmaster
105 Doc Samson
106 Madrox
107 Shang-Chi
108 Titania/Viper (we've not quite decided)
109 Beta Ray Bill
110 Man-Wolf
111 Union Jack
112 Dazzler
113 Ka Zar
114 Black Knight
115 Machine Man
116 X-23
117 Ikaris
118 Tigra
119 Hellcat
120 Enchantress

Now as some of you may remember we ran a poll to choose the costume for the Madrox figurine, and despite it being very close the most modern version of the character won. So, I know this is going to split opinions but we’ve gone with this costume for the figure, as shown below, with an image of the final sculpt stage.



If you voted for the first Kirby costume I hope that the quality of the sculpt at least eases the pain of not having ‘your’ version. I personally love this costume; I think it matches the direction the character has been going in perfectly, while at the same time paying homage to the Jack Kirby costume with the T-shirt design.

So this just leaves me with one last thing to talk about and that’s the polls from last week. They finished today and it looks like Chameleon is a no-brainer but the MK poll appears to have ended in a tie between Blackheart and Gladiator. I think we’ll have to settle this with a showdown – Blackheart vs. Gladiator, no-holds barred, well as ‘no-holds barred’ as a poll between the two characters can be.

For anyone who doesn’t know the characters check out the pic and mini-description I’ve put below.

Blackheart
(First app. Daredevil #270 1989) – Son of the demon-lord Mephisto, Blackheart was created from the evil energy that accumulated in the town of Christ’s Crown, a particularly popular spot with murderers. He’s fought Daredevil, Spider-Man and Ghost Rider and constantly tried to usurp his father’s position in hell.



Gladiator, Melvin Potter (First app. Daredevil #18 1966) – A costume designer who made his own suit of battle armour, complete with deadly wrist blades, Melvin Potter decided to become a professional criminal. One of Daredevil’s earliest foes, who has also fought Iron Man and Spider-Man. Gladiator has reformed a couple of times and helped Elektra and Daredevil fight the Hand.




I’ll have some more character polls up early next week.

Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Friday 7 November 2008

Extended...

It’s Friday and so in celebration of the weekend I thought I’d update the blog.

I know everyone wants to know if we’re getting extended and I’ve put off answering for weeks now, but I can finally confirm that the Classic Marvel Figurine Collection is going up to 140 issues.

That's right 140 issues!!!

So first of all I’d like to say a huge thanks to everyone who’s made this mag successful, without the collectors we wouldn’t be here.

And of course you know what that means… we need to choose another 20 characters to immortalise in lead.

So far we have Jubilee, as I’ve already promised you guys she’d be included, that leaves 19 places.

As the collection has grown we’ve tried to include as many fan-favourites as we can but for the first time in the series I want to let you guys decide who gets on to the regular list. As such I’m going to be putting up plenty of polls on the blog as well as coming up with different ways to let you choose which figures we should include.

As I've said we’ve got 19 places left, however I am going to call 4 of those places for the guys in the office to choose a favourite, leaving you guys with 15 to choose.

Obviously, I’m going to have to choose who’s going to be in a poll but I hope to keep all polls themed, i.e. Fantastic Four, Spider-Man foes, cosmic heroes etc… After running a few polls I think we’ll have a second and third place play-off, where everyone who finished second or third gets another chance. So all votes count.

So without further to do I have two polls ready, one for Spidey villains, one poll for Marvel Knights/Daredevil characters.