Custom Wolverine Figure

There have been a whole bunch of Wolverine figures throughout the years but I was never fully satisfied with any one of them. The latest offering was the super nifty Marvel Legends Series 3 Wolverine, easily the best Wolverine figure to date but not without it's nitpicks. So I set off to do one that was more attuned to my fanboy preferences. Be warned the following rambling is pretty long winded since it's my most complex custom to date. Yer better off just clicking the thumbnails.

My first criteria was that he would be in the brown costume of the gritty 80's. He kinda went soft when he went back to his original colors. Besides a yellow and blue murdering machine just ain't threatening. The second criteria was that I wanted to use the torso from a Baki the Grappler figure. It has the same forward shoulder swivel as Marvel Legends Hulk and Iron Man but without the ugly gaping holes in the back. I'm a major scale freak so converting the 7 inch Baki figure into a 6" scaled figure, a 5"3 person in the 6 inch scale to be more precise, meant some MAJOR shortening. To make him shorter, I had to loose Baki's abdomen articulation( the same that is seen on Spider Sense Spiderman and upcoming ML figs) as well as shortening his forearms abit.

But I still wanted to replicate the same range of motion for the stomach so I ended up using the abdomen of an Ultimate Muscle King Muscle. I hollowed out Baki just underneath the pectorals and created a space where the new abdomen would fit. Then I slapped some fast dryin' epoxy putty on the sides of KM's abs thus creating pegholes for the pegs that were stickin' out on the sides, all the while making sure that movement is not hindered.

The waist comes from a ML Captain America and from the knees on down it's all ML Wolverine. I completely hollowed out the inside of Cap's briefs so that the bottom of King Muscle's waist would fit in it's entirety. I stuffed a thin layer of epoxy putty inside Cap's waist, jammed KM's abs down but good and hoped that the epoxy putty inside, when squished, would catch onto the the abs' waist thus keeping it in place. And luckily it did just that, I twisted the abs right before the epoxy putty fully dried so that the waist articulation is kept intact. Wow, this paragraph makes absolutely no sense, so let's move on.

I wanted to recreate a more poseable neck as well, so I had to say goodbye to Baki's neck with the help of me trusty dremel. Once again I'm inspired by the range of movement of the Ultimate Muscle figures so I went with that type of articulation. I sanded away the neck area in order to make room for the new neck piece, that of Robin Mask of Ultimate Muscle fame. I made sure the neck piece would have room to slightly move up and down then I slapped some epoxy putty on the sides where the connecting pegs are, thus attaching it to to the torso. Then it's a matter of shaping the epoxy putty around it to something that resembled trapezius muscles and clavicles.

For the very first time, I also ended up dabbling with some minor casting and molding. The neck piece of Ultimate Muscle figs had a ball peg on both ends of the piece that made it easy for the head to pop off and be replaced. So I made a mold out of that spiffy keen neck piece and then made several castings so I can use a number of them for interchangeable heads.

All the heads were sculpted from Super Sculpey with assists from epoxy putty. I decided to model the heads from certain looks I particularly dug, such as the earlier interpretations of his mask where the horns didn't flare out at the sides but rather tapered to the back of his head. I also did another masked head where I tried to base it on Marc Silvestri's renditions. I don't think I'll ever find an official Marvel Legends Unmasked Wolvie fig so I ended up trying my own version as well. The head is made out of super sculpey, the hair from epoxy putty and the cigar was cut from an ML wolvie plastic claw. Remember kids," tobacco is "wacko" if you're a teen."

I also opted not to use plastic claws for the figure and used some metal T pins I had lying around instead. Sparks flew as I cut the T pins to the length I wanted and then it was just a matter of drilling tiny holes in the claw housings, taken from the ML Wolverine figure, and then plugging them in.

When painting, I first primed him with Krylon gray spray primer, hand painted him with Citadel paints, airbrushed the shading in, and finally sprayed Testors Dullcote to seal the figure. In the end he clocks in at 38 points of articulation. Now mebbe finally, I can stop making customs of this guy.

5/03