013-R
Big Blast- Graffiti Designs- Big Blast: Mike Mignola’s Hellboy.
Date Released: 2001
Current Price and availability: $119.99
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Big-Blast-Mi...0AAOSwjR5c9UTB
If for some reason I have to drastically downsize my collection and only pick a handful of figures to keep, this Hellboy would easily be one of the first chosen and given that I have thousands I would say that is pretty high praise. In fact it would be fairly difficult to say goodbye to all the Big Blast figures as I think they are all pretty fantastic and were well before their time. Consider this, a detailed, fully poseable, 6 to 8 inch toy line line of comic book characters geared to the collector market that was first released in 1998 predates Toy Biz’s Marvel legends, Hasbro’s Black series and even Mattel’s DC Multiverse line. Perhaps they were taking a que from the Spawn toys of the era, but these figures are really nothing like the super stylized, non-articulated figures that Macfarlane was known for, but as they only made 6 figures in total and quickly faded away I have to believe that they were not the success that I felt they should have been.
At any rate, my love of Hellboy can be traced back to my comic box collecting days when I happened upon and picked up the initial Dark Horse Mini-Series; Seed of Destruction; which, like the Big Blast Toys, was before its time considering this is still the heyday of Marvel, DC and the comic code ensuring squeaky clean context. Not that's Hellboy was overtly mature, but he is a literal devil, plucked out of Hell by the Nazi’s who’s job is to investigate paranormal activity; not exactly spinner rack material. I guess it was the 90s though and the world was a changing.
Unfortunately my enjoyment of the character has lessened over the years due to the the 2 big budget live action films that just fell flat with me. And by all accords I’m in the minority here, but I just don’t like how Ron Pearman played the character: he was too cocky or smug from what I imagined he should be. In any case, it was nice that Hellboy received some mainstream attention. Not sure what to think about the new movie, but the previews look promising.
Pros: Fantastic cartoonish sculpt that captures the look from the comic perfectly. Good amount of articulation for the time and comes complete with sword and token sidearm. The soft goods trench coat also works remarkably well given the size class.
Cons: He’s a bit top heavy and cannot hold a pose very well without falling over. Additionally, and this seems like a typical problem, the plastic holding the ankle joint has a tendency to snap and while this doesn’t cause a clean break of the ankle from the leg it makes the joint useless and I eventually just glued it stabilize the figure.
