Marvel Universe: Octo-Spidey, and Big Time Spider-Men

Turning things back to the web-slinger, we’ve got some quick customs from some unexpected sources.

Marvel Universe: Big Time Spider-Man

 

It’s tricky making customs for a struggling toyline, particularly when it sees new releases just sporadically enough to make you doubt its ability to go on, let alone get around to certain characters or designs. This is precisely the dilemma we ran into when making a figure of Spider-Man in his Big Time duds. The decision was made fairly soon after the Marvel Legends figure saw release (it can be quite inspiring to see designs in 3D in different scales — this informed my Minimates customs too), with the necessary caveat that we not make it quite so… green.

For the Legends figure, Hasbro was clearly going for a look that showed how the brightness of the costume’s green light strips covered the black material in a green glow, but had trouble executing it. At first I thought they’d cast most of the parts in green plastic but the figure looks to have been painted a flat green on top of the black. This looked decent in some lighting and from some angles, I suppose, especially if you charitably focused on the main “light” strips, but it had trouble consistently looking good in hand.

 

So the decision was made to start with a black base, as befitting the costume which was black to start with anyway. This was accomplished through the use of one of the many Black Costume redecos, which gave us the twofold benefit of a black-cast base to minimize paint rub and a headsculpt with raised Spidey eyes. Painted over the white deco on the torso and started painting the stripes from scratch, applying the white primer layer with a toothpick. Tried a different thing next, going over the white base with Apple Barrel green glow-in-the-dark paint rather than the usual Vallejo. There should be a picture here of a test of the glow effect.

Of course, Hasbro then proceeded to roll out a surprise some time after as they released their own Big Time Spider-Man. My brother picked that one up when he got the wave as a set (simpler that way to avoid the headache and extra cost of cherry-picking favorites) — we may revisit that and paint it one of the alternate color schemes.