Sad that the day after DC Fandome with all of the beloved and amazing characters and rich characters designs from the DC universe, the only new threads that we have to show for it around here are one for “Doomsday Lightning Man” and another for “Mars Guardian.”
That tells you all you will ever need to know about how Hot Toys feels about DC.
It sucks. I choose to be philosophical about it, though. HT will throw us bones such as Black Suit Superman and Knightmare Batman which are essentially reissues. And Cyborg does look amazing. I’m not getting one but the Batman Beyond figure is also impressive. We’ll almost surely get a Pattinson Batman. Probably Flash Keaton Batman. And eventually a Black Adam figure. But it won’t be anything like the offerings for Star Wars and MCU fans. Anyway, we’ll get what DC figures we get from HT.
But just as Honda was once the undisputed king of Japanese imports, Hyundai and Kia copied them and eventually rivaled them in terms of basic craftsmanship. I think
hopefully we may be seeing something like that with the third party companies making the unlicensed figures. There are plenty of former HT employees by now that know how HT runs it’s operation, e.g., how costume design is done, plenty of talented CAD artists out there that can design head sculpts, head sculpt painters, 3D printing is available to all, etc. I mean “Doomsday Lightning Man” has a pretty impressive looking suit design, for example. The head sculpt looks pretty good as well. “Mars Gaurdian” seems the weaker offering of the two, but so far it’s just four promotional prototype phots, so jury is still out on that I’d say.
I mean
of course I’d rather have HT figures than the third party ones. But evidently Howard Chan doesn’t give a **** about the DC buyer market. So my hope is that this will drive the third party companies to up their game as they fill the vacuum.
