Sixth Scale Man
Super Freak
Looks good! It’ll be nice to have him join the collection.
Looking at the video I'd say this turned out quite nice. Considering AUG is a relatively unknown company with hardly any track record, this Stillsuit Paul figure turned out to be as good as the promo pics, if not somewhat better. "Better" being less of a qualitative assessment and more of a psychological sense of relief, because sometimes it feels like a burden lifted to see a figure that isn't shockingly different or worse than the promo pics. There's not a lot to nitpick here.
The sculpt is much better than the previous ceremonial suit version, which looked like a cosplay Paul, approaching the likeness, but off in a way that was irritating. It does looks like the body is heftier than what the promo pics showed - he should be very thin and scrawny under that suit, to the point that the bulk of the suit material doesn't even add much to the body's silhouette/profile.
I like the sculpted hair a lot here. It reminds me of Art Figure's Scissorhands figure from a couple of yeas ago, where the hair was so complex and finely-detailed that it left no real desire for a rooted treatment. Sometimes you have to ask what's really being achieved by the hot pursuit of something that can't be done to a satisfying degree at this scale. Seeing how InArt so massively fumbled the sculpted hair on their Aragorn figure, AUG's work here outclasses them by a long mile. Again, a relatively unknown company with little history can show us how it should be done... and done within a good price point.
* Just a footnote on the rooted hair topic, I'm starting to lean out of any strong desire for pursuing rooted hair after InArt's latest Gandalf and Aragorn releases. The figures are great, but not without some irritating problems with the hair. Problems that belie what the promo pics showed and created the incentive for our preorder deposits. In figure sculpting and tailoring we're trying to approach scaled accuracy and realism, and we've gotten closer every few years through innovation, increased skill and craft and advancing technology. We can achieve a lot more of the illusory accuracy with plastic, whereas rooted hair scaled down to 1/6 is almost taking us backward to problematic points in craft and workmanship of the past. We're no longer looking at the accuracy of the figure, but struggling with the localized unpredictable behaviour of the material itself in rooted hair. You can have a mostly perfect and satisfying looking figure, topped with a mop of some artificial and off-putting toupée material that almost ruins everything, and then we're left debating and finicking the material rather than the overall figure. Rooted hair still seems to resist taming and doing the job of sculpting the illusion of the character-figure's proper hair styling. Sometimes it just looks "off" rather than on-point and there's not much of the artist/sculptor's intent and craft left in the material. The innovation will happen, and InArt did make great strides with how they treat rooted hair, but there's still a lot of work to do.
Enter your email address to join: