First up I've seen a few comments asking us how we choose characters and how we choose poses. So here's a little insight:
Characters – When we choose which characters are going into the collection we look at a number of factors. We look at the character's popularity (within the collection as well as the comic world), we look at how many appearances and the importance of these appearances they've made and we look at how the character fits into our collection.
There's no strict set of rules except that a character must have enough appearances/back-story to make a good figurine and magazine. In the past we've gone for the A-listers first and then moved down through the ranks, while trying to keep the collection diverse. It's not the Spider-Man collection or the X-Men/FF/Avengers collection, so I'm always keen to have a healthy variety.
Now that we've got through pretty much all the 'big' characters the choice is a lot more subjective and it's very difficult to choose characters for extensions mostly because I can't decide who not to make. In the past few extensions, I've let you guys decide (on here and the forum) and I've let a few members of staff/contributors choose some.
I understand the need to complete teams and that is definitely something I want to do but if we just go for completing teams we've already started then we'll have pretty much an entire extension filled with one branch/area of Marvel comics. I know Alpha Flight/X-Men/Brotherhood are popular but it's great to have at least one character representing each area. I think there's a strong chance this collection will continue past 140 and each extension gives us the chance to fill/complete some teams and start new ones.
Pose – As for the pose, this greatly varies depending on the character. Some have very obvious, classic stances/poses that have to be done and others have great pieces of artwork that we can base a pose on. However, now that we've got down to some lesser-known characters, the costume and pose artwork can be slim. We'll try to order most of the comics a character is in and choose reference from these, we'll then ask our sculptors/artists to come up with poses and lastly we'll get Marvel's approval. We always try to capture a little something of the character in each pose, whether that's very subtle or a little over-the-top depends on the character.
At the start of the collection we went for more stoic, static poses that aimed to show the heroic (or villainous) nature of the character but without turning them in to action figures. As the collection has been extended and evolved over the years we've tended to make the characters more dynamic while keeping the integrity of the early models.
At the end of the day, it's for you guys to decide if we've done this well but we're definitely not slacking off. You wouldn't believe some of the arguments/debates we have in the office over the sculpt details.
Anyway, there's a little look into how we work (which made it a longer post than I had originally planned) and here's the Enchantress.
Enjoy!
