lurid

the bottom has laregly fallen out of the action figure market on ebay, which i’ve been abusing to get caught up on stuff i wanted as a kid but couldn’t get, had as a kid but foolishly got rid of, was more recently unable to find in stores, or found in the last 5-10 years, since i hit my toy-collecting prime, but couldn’t afford, or waited too long on and missed.

into that last category falls the fewture models devilman line. they had giant stacks of them at just be toys, in their old closet-sized store, and i pored over them for a long time trying to will the money into my hands to buy them. i never could afford more than one without sacrificing the other cool stuff they had there, like microman l.e.d. powers and a few sets of kubricks, so i only ever bought the naked girl in light-up ‘experiment chamber’ and then saved my money for the diabolous figure from final fantasy 8, aka the devil as interpreted by yoshitaka amano.

but the rest of the figures always looked cool, and it wasn’t just that only one of the many female figures had a shirt on. they had big demon-guys and wierd guyver-esque mutants and topless bird-ladies and some even wierder stuff. the devilman stuff came out around the same time as mcfarlane’s sculptors lost their minds, and just started sculpting extra crap onto every unadorned surface, forgetting that all that detail blurs together without any sense of design.

the devilman figures, on the other hand, were tall, nicely posable, brilliantly sculpted and designed, clean, and very wierd and cool. they hit all the points mcfarlane wanted to but either couldn’t or wouldn’t, and did it with a style that’s only evident in a 100th of mcfarlane’s output.

but they were also like $20 each and there was no way i could afford that. thankfully, some dude on ebay seems to have ended up with a warehouse of stuff by fewture, because i’ve been getting them for around $10 apop, and buying up the figures i wanted but couldn’t afford. i got the monster girl with demon mouths on her breasts and in her fore-arms which open from the elbow like a crocodile. i got the blue demon guy with tentacles for hair who looks vaguely lovecraftian. i just got the girl with a giant face that covers her torso, interchangeable with skull and monster faces underneath.

and then there’s satan. whereas devilman himself is red-skinned, with black furry legs, demonic feet, black horny crests on his head, and big black bat wings, satan is all blue and white, with feathery angel-wings, and she’s got huge bared breasts. the figure never actually caught my interest until i found a repaint in clear blue/white plastic. okay, already much cooler. i’m buying. i see the sticker that says ‘glowing action’ but i can’t make out much more. i figure it’s a standard glow-in-the-dark overspray on the whole figure, so she’ll glow faintly all over. no. the glow is all concentrated in one part of her body.

she has glow-in-the-dark breasts.

this is my new favorite figure of all time. although not, surprisingly enough, the first figure of mine with large glowing breasts. the variant lady death by moore action collectibles, only available through their fan club, was the same black bikini and skull-encrusted stockings as the regular figures, but cast all in glow in the dark plastic with black paint. still, she’s just standing around in a bikini whereas satan is full-frontal with usable articulation, so satan wins.

hail satan!