Well, since I appear to be on a bit of a "green villains" kick, might as well stick to the theme. Moving on, my next posting is the relatively obscure Spider-Man enemy, the Beetle.

Much like Loki, both ToyBiz and Hasbro have taken a stab at our flying friend here. ToyBiz did a "modern armor" version that was roughly equal in size to the Hulk. But hey, at least he was based on an actual main-universe comic appearance of the character. On the other hand, Hasbro, much more recently, also released a Beetle figure, but based on his Ultimate Comics design. A very cool look, bot once again, neither based on his classic appearance.

I'm not a huge fan of the character, so for me, Beetle was mostly an exercise in creative figure engineering. I was mostly just interested in designing the backpack that contains the Beetle's wings. Obviously, the wings weren't going to actually fold into the shell, but at the very least, the shell should open and the wings would clip into the back. But how?

The solution came to me from an old Gundam model kit: a wing joint from a Wing Gundam, which was constructed with a hinge/rotate "tube joint." A pair of these would allow the Beetle shell wings to hinge backwards from his back, then rotate to the sides and spread apart, allowing room for his insect wings to peg into his back.

I installed the wing joints into an X-Men Classics Archangel body (in fact, it may well have been the spare Mandarin body left over from that custom, I don't recall). The hands and feet came from Hasbro's Ultimate Wolverine figure, and the head and shell wings were entirely sculpted by hand. I cut a section out of the figure's back, and from a ML Wasp figure, I cut out the section of her back that held her wing joints. I sculpted Beetle's back to seamlessly socket in the Wasp wings, and painted them with transparent blue. A complete head-to-toe repaint, and this figure was in the bag.

For a figure that was mostly intended as practice, this Beetle turned out surprisingly well, and I have no problem sitting him on my shelf with the rest of my Spider-Man display. He may not be perfect (in particular, he's somewhat hurt for his lack of a flight stand hold in his back, but there's no place to put it with the wing assembly), but he's a worthy addition, and I'm happy to have him around.

Excelsior!