Giant Man is the latest Marvel Legends project from Hasbro’s crowdfunding platform, HasLab. At New York Comic Con 2023, lead designer Dwight Stall took time to talk with The Beat about the Giant Man project. He showed off a prototype of the third largest and most detailed Marvel Legends figure yet.
If you passed by the Marvel booth at NYCC, just to the side of the stage where Marvel staffers chucked freebies into the crowd was a small, but very impressive Hasbro display. Hasbro produces Marvel’s main action figure line, Marvel Legends. The line is in its astounding 21st year of toy production. Over the years, we’ve seen a few of versions of Giant Man, a standard 6″ figure, a bigger Build-A-Figure figure, and even a large MCU version. But none of them have been as giant as the HasLab Giant Man.
My first question for Dwight was “Why Giant Man?” He quickly responded with the Avengers 60th anniversary being this year, they wanted to do something special for that. “We had just done the First Appearance Iron Man. We had a classic Hulk out there. We thought it would be a good time to do the biggest member of the team, Giant Man. On top of that, the other thing we made a Galactus and a Sentinel. You need something to punch it in the face, which means you need something big enough to do that. Giant Man seemed like a good fit.”
The HasLab Giant Man action figure is very big. The Hasbro Con video presentation didn’t do the figure justice. Seeing it in person, this figure looks both big and solid. I asked Dwight if he preferred working on large scale figures in Haslab, like Giant Man and Galactus. Or did he prefer working on vehicles or a playset design. He answered, “I’m always open to something new, to have a new challenge. It was really exciting last year to try to get the Engine of Vengeance out there last year because that was something new and unique. I had never worked on a premium type vehicle. That was a cool challenge. I got to learn a lot on that project. That’s the best part about this. That you can learn more and improve your craft. I don’t really have a preference. I think it would be really subjective for me as to the subject matter. There’s no right or wrong for me. It’s always fun to try something different.”
I was astounded by the level of detail that Dwight and his team had packed into the Giant Man figure. The delineation of the trunks from the pants, as well as the delineation of the gloves where they meet Giant Man’s sleeves are very impressive. As is all the texturing across his costume. I asked Dwight if working in scale this large was harder than working in the smaller Marvel Legends scale, because something that doesn’t look right at this size would really not look right. I responded, “When we started, we knew that if we really didn’t give this thing the attention to detail it deserved, it could look cheap. So we wanted to make sure we put every detail we could into this piece. Seams, textures, patterns, everything. There are certain cheats you can get away with on the 6 inch scale, especially when you look at the Legends line where we use so many parts over again. You can’t be too specific because you might need it for something else. But on these types of dream projects, where you’re all in on one thing, we just dove in.”
In the initial plans for Giant Man, the figure was going to be designed with fewer unique parts in mind. Dwight elaborated, “We were talking about making it differently so that we could use it for other things down the line, but we decided that hopefully we’d be able to do that, that wasn’t going to be our focus. “We wanted to make this the most ultimate Giant Man you’ve ever seen.” No one can complain looking at Giant Man that Hasbro is using some money for the Xth time.
It really is impressive the more I looked at it. I complimented on the design, and wanted to know about the figures various head and face sculpts. How do they work? Do the heads come off? Just the eyes and mouth parts? Dwight explained it to me. “The entire head itself is 6 different pieces. “Two antenna, the head sock, the faceplate, the eyes and the skull.” He pulled out his phone to show me a prototype head. “This is the picture of what the actual skull looks like inside. You can see the break line on the faceplate. At that break line, the faceplate can pull forward and you can pop out the eyes and put different eyes on it. Then snap back the faceplate on the skull. Once you do that, you can slide it into the head sock, and without any stress or strain, it pops right back in. You just click the jowls of the mask back on and you’re done. It’s that simple and quick to swap the heads out.”
I asked Dwight what’s his favorite thing about the Giant Man Haslab figure. He answered, “For me, it’s the eyes. We’ve never been able to make lifelike eyes before on Legends. The scale allowed us to look at it differently. It’s a different entity, but what Hot Toys does with its lifelike eyes, we wanted to give that a shot with our Legends line. At this scale, we were able to do that. All the eyes are clear plastic. The deco of the eyes are painted on the backside of it. Not only can you switch your eyes to different expressions, but they really catch the light in a lifelike manner. “They look more alive than anything we’ve done before.”
What was the hardest part of realizing from design to final product on the HasLab Giant Man? Dwight answered quickly. “The harness. Everything we’ve ever done with secondary harnesses and belts, when they’re connected like this design is, they never functioned properly. In the old days, if you bent him backwards, that belt would have ridden up to his chest. Or if you tried to move it, it would have bunched up and not functioned. We worked with our engineering team to come up with a new system that allows the V to go through the lower part of his abdomen between the middle and lower torso, and up his back. It’s one continuous loop that allows his belt to stay in place no matter what poses him in. The V is a structural V. On smaller figures, that would likely be painted, and it would break as move the butterflies. But on this one, you get a perfect V no matter how you want to do it. It can slide up or down a little bit depending on the pose you want to put him in. It was one of our biggest accomplishments and one of our biggest challenges to make that function well.”
The funding for HasLab’s Giant Man concludes at the stroke of midnight on the night of Monday, October 23. Once the campaign ends, Hasbro will only produce the number of Giant Man figures ordered in the campaign.
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