Little lead men of valour: Look! Up in the Sky! Its a bird? Its a plane?....

Hello again,

Something has been bubbling under the surface for a number of years at LLMV (Little Lead Men of Valour).

I am a fan of super heroes. Not a huge obsessive OTT fan, but I do enjoy super hero films, and in my time I did collect a number of different super hero comics (Iron Man, Silver Surfer, Avengers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). Actually on the comic front my main obsession was with British comics Eagle and 2000AD.

Fellow clubmate James Wright (his blog "Lead Capes" has a link on the right) has been running superhero games for a number of years. He has an impressive superhero collection and a fantastic city terrain set up.

His rule system of choice is Super System (now in its 4th edition). Its a nice tidy system that captures the flavor of superhero combat without being tied in to any particular franchise. His games could easily see Hell Boy, The Hulk and Batman battling it out on the tabletop. However the best fun is in creating your own heroes, inventing a backstory and working out their super powers.

Over the past couple of years I have picked up a bunch of heroclix figures (mostly leftovers from James' collection). I have planned to use some of them as the iconic heroes they are, but the more obscure figures can serve as a starting point for conversion into my own personal heroes.

James is planning on running a short series of linked games during November so I took the opportunity to finally get out the scalpel and green putty to modify some clix figures into a new three person hero team.

The three starting characters were The Phantom Lady, Blizzard & Colossus. Each character was removed from its clix base and mounted onto 20mm round bases. I covered the bases with milliput and sculpted in pavement. Each characters was modified with putty.

Here are the original heroclix models:

The Phantom Lady had the least modification with a minor remodeling of her eye mask and covering up the cleavage a little.. The blizzard figure was given a cape, belt and jewel in his forehead. However the Colossus figure had substantial remodeling as I had to remove his forearm bands, belt and steel collar and re carve and sculpt his head. I then added putty to cover where I had cut away. There was little facial detail on the model so I sculpted in a mouth.

When cured the models were undercoated with the Vallejo undercoat medium and were ready for painting.
I then came up with a custom paint job and started working out their powers.

The Phantom lady hero has the power of flight and has basic combat powers but excels in mind powers to confuse the enemy or launch psionic attacks.

The Blizzard character has a ranged attack power, has reasonable physical fighting abilities and has foresight to see things slightly before they happen giving him an edge in combat.

Lastly the Colossus character is the brawn of the team. Super Strong, fairly fast and resilient. Not much in the brains department. Just point him at an enemy and let him loose!