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Monday, 11 July 2005 |
 This custom has been a long time in the making - I have wanted to modify the Thing ever since picking him up with the rest of the second assortment of Marvel Legends, and he's been in pieces waiting for me to work on him for over a year.
It's not that the original is a bad figure - the sculpt is pretty good, and the articulation, while a little dated by today's standards, was pretty cutting edge at the time. It came down to two things. First, he's just too tall, towering head and shoulders above the other Fantastic Four figures we've gotten. He should be just as wide as he is, but not as tall. Second, I've always liked the pants and boots combo better than the shorts and bare feet. While he's no rocket scientist like Reed Richards, he's no Hulk either - his wearing pants and boots reminds me that he knows what he is and wants to regain his humanity.
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 Thing is mostly the Thing from ML Series 2, with the articulated hands from the Thing in the Fantastic Four Heroes Reborn box set that was exclusive to Wal-Mart earlier this year. If I hadn't already cut up the one from ML2, I probably would have used the Heroes Reborn Thing and saved myself the hand swap.
The Fantastic Four movie (great fun) reminded me I had this in progress, and in the interim I had learned a lot more about putting things back together, so I resumed where I left off. I did another set of cuts in the thighs. The legs I rebuilt using a combination of 2-ton epoxy and Oatey epoxy putty.
I had seen a couple of Thing modifications that added a bicep swivel (like Norm's), so I cut right below the shoulder disk. RoboKillah reminded me that Arkenyon was planning to shorten his Thing's forearms at the wrist swivel, so I did that too.
Reassembling the arms involved building a ball shoulder using epoxy putty, adding a peg (a wooden skewer covered with multiple layers of super glue) to it, and adding a socket to the bicep (drilled with the dremel and filled with plumber's epoxy. I built up the top part of the biceps (which were cut straight across) with more epoxy putty, and drilled rock patterns on the added portions, the smoothed out shoulders, and the thinned down forearms.
The legs and boots were sculpted using Super Sculpey. I had fun with my first real sculpting of muscles. Most artists give him standard musculature when he's in pants, despite the fact that he's still rock under there. In hindsight, I may have made him a little too ripped in the legs, but I was having too much fun. I added the seams to the pants and boots as a last -minute touch.
The rubber band belt covers the cut I made in the torso, which I was too lazy to dremel down and resculpt. It limits the waist swivel which I had worked hard to retain, but allowed me to give him the wide belt he uses and saved me a lot of trouble. The "4" buckle is the top of a thumb tack with the "4" sculpted on with Super Sculpey.
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