Aaaah. Now we're getting somewhere! At this stage, you can feel life being brought back to the sculpt. The arms and neck are lengthened to emphasize her mixture of femininity and youth. The pose has been softened. Her butt and hips are given more shape and volume. Molly's finally beginning to look like a beautiful living and breathing young woman! Now we have to really work on that hair...

I just bought the Transformers Animated Bulkhead figure. I love the damned thing. It's my first Transformer purchase in 20 years and I love every plastic joint, wheel, and man boob. I miss the diecast metal pieces and metallic decals my old transfomers had. But Bulkhead won my heart with it's chunkiness and decent transformation complexity.

I'm embarrassed to say that I couldn't figure out how to transform the damned thing. My girlfriend had to give me a helping hand in figuring out the instructions (for shame!). But with some concentrated practice I can now transform from robot to truck and back to robot again in 0.127 seconds (don't ask for a youtube video).

While photographing Bulkhead, I realized I have a man crush on green and silver cyborg/robot type thingees. I gathered my favorites to create a green and silver toy posse led by Mini Gobi Original. But at the very moment I was considering the eventual world domination by green and silver objects of badassery... out came 2 vicious feline monstrosities to upstage their badassery.

Yet again, Gobi inspires the Muttpop Crew! The first pic is my homage to Gobi's Butcher book pic, followed by wonderful homages by Ohm (lead artist of our upcoming Tcho By Ohm line), Tanquerelle (artist of Luchadoritos), Jerry, and finally Gobi's original pic.

Just to give you some context, Gobi and Jerry's latest Tequila story has a sequence in a meat butcher shop. Gobi was able to find the glorious photo book of butchered meats from his local butcher in preparation for illustrating the sequence in comic form. The picture was so classic that we all had to chime in with our own rendition.

Actually, reality is we're all exhibitionists that love to share our hairy nipples with the world. God bless the world wide web.

At this stage of Molly's sculpt, Lester and Erick really cleaned her up by transferring their sculpting from Sculpey to Wax and refining all the details through melting and shaping the wax. Wax is great for making things super clean and tight. But there's always a loss in crucial nuances when transferring the sculpt from Sculpey to Wax.

When going from Sculpey to Wax a silicon mold is made to capture the shape of the sculpey form. Once that cools down, liquid wax is poured into the silicone mold and, once it cools and hardens you have a wax recreation of the original sculpey figure. Unfortunately when making the silicone molds, you see anywhere from a 3-5% shrinkage in the shape of the figure... and depending on how the silicone reacts to cooling down, the finer details of the figure and subtle shapes are lost.

We were very disappointed with how the figure looked at this stage. The figure looks very stiff and blocky. The face looked like a puppet instead of a living, breathing being. The posture came across as clunky and stiff (especially from the front). The wrinkles at the knees had a very unnatural sharp edge. The gloves looked super heavy. Even at this stage there were a lot of things to address.

Check back next Tuesday to see how the Sosa Bros. tackled the various problems.

The latest issue of Lucha Libre 5 is now officially in finer comic shops across the US. Below are my comic purchases of the week. Best comic of the week? Lucha Libre Comics 5, of course!

As Lester and Erick Sosa continued sculpting Molly, we felt things were going in the wrong direction. In the earlier stages of sculpting there was an energy and dynamic nature to Molly that was lacking at this stage. The head and hands became unnecessarily large. The arms looked okay from a profile perspective but too thick from the front. Molly's chest began looking like a breast implant job gone wrong. All of these issues were addressed to the Sosa brothers and Muttpop was assured that the appropriate changes would be made to address them.