Action Figures

Last week I mentioned Clash Creative and their production/representation of several properties they’ll be submitting to publishers in the near future, but I didn’t know that they had announced a project I had a hand in developing several years ago.

Some time after our work together on HeroTV and before working on ArmorQuest, Ben Avery and I were batting around a couple of different ideas and one of those was this story about a group of kids that were able to turn into real-life versions of their favorite action figures. We wanted to hit a wide range of genres with this so we honed in on a 40s-era Cliffhanger Action Hero (Nash Raider), a Silver-Age Superhero (The Cowled Owl), a Sword & Sorcery Barbarian character (Grun-Tar), a Futuristic Techno-Ninja (Red Zero), and a Barbie-type character who was also a Master of Disguises and highly skilled in a wide variety of disciplines (Modelin’ Madeline). With the character types and eras in mind, I set myself to designing the characters while Ben fleshed out the concept and drafted a preliminary script. We had our friend Jonathan Koelsch illustrate a couple of pages of art to get a tidy proposal in place.

We moved on to other projects once the preliminary work was completed on the concept, but Ben recently dusted it off and placed it with Clash Creative to give it a fresh set of legs. As a bonus, Clash hired Jonathan Koelsch to complete one of his original pages and to jazz up my designs with colors.

So with Action Figures making it’s debut of sorts, I figured now’s a good time to run these character designs.

Nash Radier and the Cowled Owl

Grun-Tar and Red Zero

Modelin' Madeline

(Sport Madeline, Kung-Fu Madeline, Scuba Madeline, and Tomb Raider Madeline)

The Kids

Action Figures, Nash Raider, Cowled Owl, Grun-Tar, Red Zero and Modelin' Madeline are © & TM 2009 Ben Avery

Art © 2009 Bud Rogers

Colors by Jonathan Koelsch