Tonight marks a special milestone for our great friend and collaborator, Marty
"The Godbeast" Hansen, as his very first full production rotocast vinyl figure is finally
ready to invade our collections!
I've been watching the creative process of this new "Titan" Mushi unfold since back in
2011, when Marty first started working through the early stages of the Titan's development (as well the first runs of our collaborative Bio Jumpers project and the original Kabuto Mushi concepts). Initially, the sculpt was quite a bit larger than the one you see above, sporting a massive horn and a very stout body. Through a series of revisions, the dimensions started to change, resulting in a couple variations to the overall design. With each passing year, the core aspects of the Titan would alter a little bit, leading up to a heavy round of joint concept work in mid/late 2014 (some of it shown above) that resulted in a more concrete basic look.
It was around this time that Marty began sculpting his new monstrosity, spending weeks working out the details and attempting to incorporate a "folding" mechanic he came up with that would allow the Titan to transform into a quadrupedal form. Many hours were spent pushing the lines and tightening the look of the overall figure, and at DCon 2014 Marty delivered a resin cast Titan to me in person for final review.
It took nearly a year from that point for the Titan to hit the production phase, due to the wonders of timing as well as a number of technical issues that we had never faced at our factory before on a vinyl project. Marty, being a maniac, decided to disregard the specific limitations that I had given him for when he was building the Mushi, resulting in some big challenges to overcome.
There were three main no-no points that were supposed to be avoided:
-No T-Crotch.
-No hard right angles.
-No extremely small protruding design elements.
The Titan Mushi master, of course, had all three of these to the maximum degree!
It took some doing to bring everything together, but thanks to our factory engineers and an intense reworking of the Titan resin master while I was recently visiting them, we managed to make it work. I personally sculpted and sanded on that little bugger for about 30 hours inside my hotel room during the stay in Dongguan. Jesse was inhaling resin dust while he slept! Luckily, he's nearly indestructible.
To see Marty's Titan Mushi come to life after all the back and forth over the years is a really satisfying thing, and even though it was tough to pull off, I'm happy that Marty pushed the limits of what we could do in rotocast vinyl production. The resulting figure stands (or crawls) with a look all its own.
It was an honor to collaborate with Marty on his latest character, and I'm looking forward to seeing what folks do when they get their hands on this latest addition to the Glyos family.
Congratulations Marty, from the whole Onell crew!