Happy Halloween

Aaron Sneery's Ghost Rider is an appropriate character for Halloween. Hope you have a spooky one.

Micropolis

The members of TwinLUG, a LEGO Users Group based in the Twin Cities, pioneered the micropolis standard. This set of standards allows different builders to make microscale (that is, much smaller than minifig-scale) units and then fit them all together to make a collaborative city layout, such as this one. Why feature this, you ask? Look closely and you'll see both the Superfriends' Hall of Justice and Fantastic Four's Baxter Building. Universes collide!

Phantom Zone

The first few posts I've put up have delved back into past MOCs, as I'm trying to establish this blog with some of the best, but one of the coolest comic-themed MOCs I've seen is quite recent, and was the thing that finally got me moving on this blog I've been contemplating for a long time. Chris Doyle presents a mosaic of the Phantom Zone with General Zod and friends from the Superman II movie.

Friendly neighborhood official theme

In recent years, LEGO has released two lines of licensed comic book sets. From 2002 to 2004 they released a series of Spider-Man sets based on the first two movies starring Tobey Maguire. Then from 2006 to 2008 they released a number of sets based on Batman, with inspirations that seemed to come from comic book, TV and movie versions of the Caped Crusader. The first set that I got from these licensed themes was 1376, Spider-Man Action Studio



It was a little frustrating that I had to pay $24 essentially for just the Spider-Man and Peter Parker minifigs. The building and car were sort of uninspired, in my opinion. They included the movie director fig and a camera, which sort of ruined the suspension of disbelief. Rather than act as if this set were really taking you into the Marvel universe, it made clear that you were on a movie set. On the plus side, the Spidey fig was a really cool addition to my fig population.

You can see the set inventory on Peeron, the instructions on LEGO.com or buy a copy on Bricklink.

Custom figs

The Superman fig in yesterday's post was never produced by LEGO. Instead it is a customized fig. Many AFOLs modify existing minifigs with paint, decals, Sculpy and other techniques to create the characters they desire. One of my favorite customizers is Norbert Black, who has made a great number of figs, including many comic book characters. He's got a great essay on how to go about creating these.

Action Comics #1

Julian Fong reproduced what is probably the most famous comic book cover ever in LEGO form.

Your friendly neighborhood cube-dude

Cube dudes are brick built characters first developed by Angus MacLane, who has built over 300. His dudes have covered all areas of pop culture, including comic book characters, such as Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus.




By the way, Angus' day job is with Pixar Studios, so you can see that he uses his artistic skills for both work and play

Welcome to ComicBricks

I grew up reading comic books. I also grew up playing with LEGO. This blog brings those two together. I'm not going to focus on people making their own LEGO comics, but rather those LEGO creations that are devoted to Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, etc, etc, etc. There are lots of great MOCs (My Own Creations, LEGO builders' term for something based on their own imaginations rather than a set of instructions) based on DC and Marvel characters, and to a lesser extent characters from other comics. There have also been official LEGO products based on Batman and Spider-Man licenses.

Those who know me are probably wondering why I'm starting another LEGO blog. Basically, I keep thinking that someone should start a blog along these lines, but no one does. I'm going to build this one up for a couple of months, and then see if someone is willing to come in as a co-blogger