OK... lots to cover...
1. I'm Tom Hodges, I co-created/Designed Ganch.
2. He appeared in Two Web Comics for starwars.com They ran concurrently with Season 2 and Season 3. Essentially, Ganch was Bolla Ropal's Clone Commander. Ropal was captured and murdered by Cad Bane in the beginning of Season 2 (which is where the web comic begins). He then became the Clone Commander to Keelyvine Reus (another co-creation between myself and Pablo Hidalgo)
Season 1 was collected in a Trade Paperback (published jointly by DHC and Dreams & Visions Press) and sold at CV, Season 2/3 are hopefully going to be collected soon together. So I get why some folks haven't seen or heard of him before. But with that said, the #1 feature on SW.com for 3 years was the Comic. 200K readers per week when posted. The web site went through a bunch of changes and has been put on hold. While popular, it was free to the public and not cost effective. Season 4 would have debuted the Phase II helmet.Sideshow requested it for the Figure.
3. Ganch's name is the form of torture in the Middle East. It's not pretty. Pablo came up with the name. If you'd like to see more images as well as the initial design George approved, I'll post it.
4. I'm COMPLETELY cool with people who don't dig the figure.But he does have a fan base. I'm seeing him pop up all over Google in everything from 501st members making the armor to customs (3 3/4 figures to Legos). So the "exclusive" will be low numbered but should also be available in limited numbers to Non-attendees.
Lastly, IrishJedi, dude, I have NO idea what I did to wrong you and to have you call me a "bad human being" but you really should contact me about it. I haven't a clue what it's about. drop me an email,
[email protected] so we can clear this up.