I’ll eventually get around to reshooting all my Target Earth and annoyingly reposting them over time. Moon Knight Alpha was on the chopping block tonight. Spoiler
Thanks, Rei! I’d done somethin’ similar, like, four years ago with another Moon Knight I had. But as with a lot of my shots recently, I revisited this idea!
Just got my target earth smogon 2 in the mail and WOW is this guy great! Way bigger than anticipated too this thing is huge! Pictured on my gamecube til I can get another detolf to display them properly in.
@Urk Congrats on the pickup, dude!!! That was the first version I came into a few years back, and I also owned the grey - ish/blue version. Now I only own the red version, and I love it. Definitely a beast of a sculpt, and there's so much charm behind it. I've yet to own the omake mini that comes with it, though. So it's even more rad you've got the pair now!
Thank you! I was just so psyched to get one to match the omake as I almost caved on the light grey/blue one. Patience payed off and with the help of a board member I got pointed in the right direction. I love this place!
Someone got the Manda deal of the year last night on a TE Bagun. Big, BIG ups to the very mind 'brainer who knew it was on my want list and alerted me... I was apparently minutes too late. After doing a triple-take on the price ("WAIT WHAT REALLY??" I actually said aloud), I logged in, got it in my cart, went to check out... only to receive an "ITEM OUT OF STOCK" message on the next page.
If it makes you feel better I was a bit puzzled by the price: after a closer look at the photos it appears the antenna was broken off and glued back on. Maybe you don’t care about that, but maybe it will help with the sting.
I did see the one pic showing that something was amiss with the horn, but I somehow took it as a paint rub... in my haste to try to grab it (and this was 1:00AM my time, I was up too late already and feeling punchy), I didn't try to read any of the description. It does take a little of the sting away, thanks, Joe... a little. I woulda lived with it, at that price!
Just saw another Bagun came and went. So odd to see a few pop up over such a short period of time. Hope you were lucky, Mike!!!
It was actually the same one, relisted! The venerable @akum6n hepped me to it, AGAIN; alas, I saw his message 25 min after he sent, apparently 25 min too late... call that DOUBLE DRAT!
The Great Gebora! I couldn't believe I was able to find this color. Always loved the sculpt, but it was basically this color or nothing for me. Thanks Mandarake. I will say, it feels like a much lower grade vinyl than the rest of my collection so far. The base vinyl is clear, and has some bubbles, yellowing, and even after being out of the bag for about 6 months now (and cleaned thoroughly) it's still a but tacky. But, maybe that just all adds to the retro charm on this weirdo.
Well, I think the vinyl in those Geboras is probably 10-15 years old at this point, so some degradation isn't surprising. We also don't know how they were stored in the intervening time. Some of the old clear vinyl figures also seem to suffer from varying degrees of yellowing and tackiness regardless of environmental conditions. I think they didn't have the information they do today when producing clears back then, so the quality varied.
Those are great points! Even though I knew that most of this Target Earth stuff was releases in the mid-late '00s, that somehow doesn't register as that far back until you literally put "10-15 years" in words ! Possibly making it the oldest vinyl I currently have, besides an old '90s Bandai Baby Godzilla. It will be very interesting to observe how my collection ages as a whole over the years. I handled up a few vintage vinyls when I visited Japan, and they were absolutely gooey, even leaving a tacky residue on your fingers! So, I hope you are correct that the vinyl mixtures have been greatly refined in recent years. Especially, I should think, with figures that have been pulled in Japan since they're renowned for their superior quality formulas, right? My initial suspicion only came from just seeing the bubbles (and even tiny dark flecks of perhaps other vinyl contaminants) embedded in a few pieces. Impossible to see unless you're really inspecting the figure like an obsessive psycho. So, nothing that diminishes it at all!
Thank you so much! I'm trying to keep this experiment going where I get the photos to feel like you're looking at the figure itself in-person. So, these images are actually comprised of 4 or 5 separate photos at various depths of focus. Then, I stack them all together and mask out the portions that are out of focus, so it's mostly all pretty sharp, and no areas get blurry. It's kind of a stupid amount of work on top of the usual post production color and level balancing. But, I really like the almost unnatural quality they take on! The down side is it also means I only have about 30% of my collection photographed unfortunately
I feel you; editing toy pics is important, necessary and worth it to me. That’s a pretty cool process you’ve adopted! Makes sense.
I realize this is probably difficult for alot of board members, including myself, but possibly consider wabi-sabi? quote: In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi (侘寂) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" in nature.
Absolutely! I'd even go as far as saying that the individual idiosyncrasies of soft vinyl are a major reason many of us collector's gravitate towards these figures. Especially in the paint applications, which can feel spontaneous and playful in their looseness. Or even occasionally in the sculpt retaining the raw clay/wax marks from the sculpting process, with cuts, pitting, or even finger prints literally preserved in the cast. I'm afraid my analysis of the figure may have sent the wrong impression that I was, in some way, unhappy with the imperfections in the vinyl. That wasn't quite the case, my concern was more about the longevity of the material and hoping it does't decay into a sticky mess. I don't think that's actually a big danger. But it does make me appreciate the more stable state of the material itself in other figures. Not aesthetically necessarily, but in terms of permanence.
I've grown to embrace the transience of things. Clears that yellow, chips, cracks etc over the years and decades. That said, sloppy or lazy contemporary production, no thanks though sometimes it has some primitive charm IMO. Now back to Target Earth...