If you're like most people, you're aching for a Batman action figure carved with the sharp angles and noir feel of the masked vigilante's 1939 debut. Or a Rorschach or Comedian doll ripped from the pages of the classic 1980s graphic novel Watchmen -- slated for big-screen treatment in 2009, but still nowhere to be found on toy shelves.
Fortunately, what Mattel and DC Comics withhold, a thriving custom action-figure underground provides.
A dedicated subculture of craftspeople have been frankensteining, kitbashing, boiling-and-popping, sculpting and painting one-of-a-kind figures for years. Their efforts are bringing to life characters that don't enjoy enough of a following to justify mass production -- think the 1950s Batman foe the Killer Moth -- or which, like the Watchmen figures, are tied up by copyright and creative differences.
"We all started customizing because there was a character we were in love with and nobody made the dolls," says Scott Rogers, a Los Angeles hobbyist who's been building figures since 1992. "Or the one they made didn't look right."
At 39, Rogers has a day job, two young children, two college degrees … and bins of spare torsos and limbs from years of taking figures apart and reassembling them to get a certain look.
Jeremy Sung, a 34-year-old in Culver City (he won't tell me what he does for money) has been making action figures for 12 years. His preferred method is "frankensteining" -- taking parts from existing figures, cobbling them together and finishing with paint and detail. He says he regularly starts by grinding an existing figure -- selected for its base color -- down to a detail-less nub, then sculpting and building back out, using clays, paint and some surprising materials to add detail.
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Zap! A Gallery of Customized Action Figures
Early on, Sung built his own Flash Gordon, which involved taking a construction worker figure and grafting dragon parts onto the head. He used leftover pieces -- the city worker's garbage can -- to build a R2D2 (?s)n+(?=(?:(?!|).)*)gure. "My first custom figure was a 3 (and) 3/4-inch GI Joe," he says. "I also made an unmasked Jinx by taking Zarana's head and sculpting a large Afro onto it."
When frankensteining isn't enough, customizers have figured out how to build joints, knees and elbows that bend, and how to make superheroes look stronger and more powerful by crafting more articulated arms and legs for them. Some people build entire figures from scratch, using clays like Sculpey and Plasticine, or they craft missing details like hands, feet, capes, weapons and insignia from the moldable plastics and then attach them to a store-bought figure. Capes have been made from toothpaste tubes, helmets from packing peanuts and oh, the endless uses for rubber bands.
With the advent of the internet, customizing changed from a lonely craft practiced in basements and garages to the center of a lively and burgeoning community that holds its own convention, Custom Con, twice a year.
They gather on websites like Fwooshnet and Daniel Pickett's Action Figure Insider.
"Everything you could want is there: advice, people to talk to, people with questions and answers," Pickett says. "Between the galleries and the message boards, it's not hanging out alone in your mom's basement."
Customizers meet theme challenges on Pickett's site, like a recent competition to interpret the old-West styled superheroes from a time-travel episode of Justice League Unlimited. That's where the inventiveness of the community is really on display, says Rogers.
"You can tell a dozen people to make the same character and you get a dozen different versions," Rogers says. "Customizing exists halfway between fandom and art."
Some customizers have signed onto a code of ethics that promotes sharing information and playing fair -- and remains studiously neutral on the growing practice of selling custom action figures for profit.
A quick search on eBay turns up a thousand listings, including parts and whole stores of customs: Steve McQueen in Bullitt, the George Reeves Superman that features faint man-breasts instead of carved abs, at least a dozen Indiana Jones figures and a host of other superheroes and villains. A dozen customizers sell on the auction site, where prices can climb into the hundreds of dollars.
Plenty of buyers exist. Some collect a favorite version of Batman -- the Dick Sprang version from the 1940s, for example, or a favorite obscure villain."When people find out about my customizing they always ask: Can you make me this guy?" says Rogers, who accepts commissions to make figures. His most popular creation is his stunning 1939 Batman from Detective Comics #27. "Can you make me?"
But selling online puts the customizers at their greatest legal risk, and they sometimes feel the heat from companies whose products they admire. Marvel, for example, has persuaded eBay to remove custom figures from its listings on copyright grounds. Usually, customizers say, the threats and pulls come when the trademarked version -- on the heels of a movie or TV promotion -- is about to hit the market.
"Three years ago, nobody cared about Ghost Rider or Transformer figures," Rogers says. "It happens as sporadic purges, but we hear about it."
But the mass marketers of action figures, including Mattel, don't really mind the customizers much, says Jim Murphy, a marketing manager for the action-play division at Mattel.
"Some one making a one-off isn't hurting us -- it's a matter of quantity," Murphy says. "Someone doing art as a hobby, well, we have bigger things on our minds."
Customizers actually mean a lot to his business, Murphy adds.
"It's really interesting to me to see what the fans want and sometimes that prompts us to do figures," he says. "It's nice to see the passion of the fans -- they love the characters and the stories."
