Some of you long-time Joecustoms members may recall a time when I actually posted customs. Well, after about five years of very, very infrequent posts, and on the occasion of CCV, I'm making my return to the world of showing other human beings my customs (aside from Kamakura, who's seen them in their natural environment, and a couple of other board members who kindly gave me some feedback on a few of the figures a while back).

I'll explain the thought process behind this whole project at some point (there is one, although it's probably not relevant to anyone but me), but suffice it to say that it's my take on the concept behind GI Joe, and that I've been working on this thing for the past year and a half. I've got the first two waves finished (Wave 2 will be posted in the near future, and includes a couple of vehicles), plus a few stragglers who will be parts of future waves.

The most important thing in the design and production of these figures was to maintain full playability, and that was also the biggest challenge, given the difficulties of customizing the modern-style Joe figures. Whenever possible, I tried to minimize the painting (especially on the arms and upper body, where chipping becomes a huge problem) and went to great lengths to make sure these guys are as durable as their production cousins. In many cases, I waited for months for certain figures to be released so I could harvest their parts for the project. So, while some of these guys might look like LBCs, I can assure you while I may be lazy, and possibly a bastard, I didn't utilize the former quality on these figures.

So, without further ado...

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Operation Mongoose

A joint U.S. military operation utilizing assets from all branches of the armed forces, the intelligence community, and cooperating friendly nations, the operation codenamed Mongoose’s primary function is counter-terrorism. Mongoose is capable of rapid response to terrorist actions, but its intended purpose is to launch pre-emptive strikes; in other words, to hit them before they have a chance to hit anyone else. The operation is under the direction of the Department of Defense and has been authorized to disregard jurisdictional and bureaucratic conflicts of interest if deemed necessary for operational efficiency. Assets are officially removed from active duty during participation in all activities related to Mongoose, and chain of command and assignment details are mission-specific. Mongoose is coordinated by a dedicated team of intelligence operatives and analysts, and is overseen by General Joseph Colton. Mission personnel are chosen from a pool of available assets selected for their expertise and field experience, with authorization to requisition other non-vetted assets from participating agencies under extenuating circumstances.

Wave 1:



Mongoose operatives:



L to R: Stone, Henry Pierce, Kenneth Rich, Lonzo Wilkinson, Felix Stratton

A few of the world's most dangerous men:



L to R: "Cobra," "Firefly," Sebastian Bludd

And now comes the deluge of photos. Thanks for taking a look!

Name: Wilkinson, Lonzo R. SN: RA725054399
Army Ranger
Birthplace: Detroit, Michigan Grade: E-5

Wilkinson served with distinction as an Army Ranger and saw combat in the hairiest conflicts of the 1980’s and early 1990’s. An extremely efficient, intelligent and dedicated soldier, and a natural leader who commands the respect of his fellow soldiers. Wilkinson has a reputation for pragmatism and a history of accomplishing mission objectives with the bare minimum of personnel and equipment loss. Noted for his ability to manage combat stress and function at a high level under taxing physical and mental conditions. An accomplished linguist, he speaks at least six languages fluently and is at least conversant in several others. Wilkinson is currently serving as an instructor at Ranger School, Fort Benning. Frequently utilized as field commander for Mongoose activities.









I realize that the head isn't going to be everybody's cup of tea, but it really fit the way I pictured ol' Lonzo. I didn't want some snarling, perpetually-furious-looking face; rather, I always envisioned him as a very calm, level-headed sort of guy, and when I saw the Star Wars figure that this particular head belonged to, I was sold.

Name: Rich, Kenneth D. SN: 091-87-6274
CIA Liaison
Birthplace: San Francisco, California Grade: N/A

Rich has extensive experience as both an intelligence analyst and field operative. Rich prefers to function primarily as support personnel, believing that his expertise in analysis and mission planning is of greater use when he can observe the situation objectively, but is also a capable combatant. Rich is also invaluable for his background in psychology (Ph.D., Berkeley, 2002). His ability to quickly and accurately analyze opponents’ behavior and motivations is frequently required on field operations.

Name: Stratton, Felix P. SN: N/A
N/A
Birthplace: Spencer, West Virginia Grade: N/A

General Joseph Colton: “Stratton’s a former mercenary, and he’s not inclined to feel guilty about it. He’s withdrawn, antisocial, and borderline sociopathic. He’s not too popular among his fellow soldiers, either, and not just because he’s a jerk: he doesn’t exactly exude trustworthiness, and anyone with a bit of sense can smell it a mile away. He’s also a fierce combatant with extensive field experience in some of the most dangerous hot-spots of the last 15 years; he’s fought in places we’ve only seen in satellite photos, which makes him a valuable commodity. He doesn’t volunteer any information about his past, and that’s for the best, because based on what we know about some of the things he’s done as a soldier of fortune, it wouldn’t do much to improve his standing among the guys in the foxhole next to him.”

Name: Pierce, Henry A. SN: N/A
Mission Coordinator, Operation Mongoose
Birthplace: Unknown Grade: N/A

General Joseph Colton: “Pierce’s service records are classified, and the fact that I couldn’t even get a look at them when I was rounding up team members for Mongoose should tell you everything you need to know about the kind of stuff he’s been involved with. I know he’s been in the service and had some kind of spec-ops training, but I’m not sure what type, or even which branch. I also know he’s been working on intel-ops since at least the late 1960’s, which would make him somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 years old. He’s got a rigorous PT regimen, though, and if he’s lost a step or two, it doesn’t seem to compromise his effectiveness. His expertise in information analysis and mission planning keeps him out of the field most of the time, but he can still operate out in the world when he has to. He’s also some kind of expert in infiltration techniques, so that can come in handy, too.”









The design (and some of the character details) for this fellow are pretty heavily lifted from the Metal Gear series. That's going to be a running theme in this whole affair, because I really loved the character designs for those games and, since the likelihood of getting a line of 1:18 figures based on the series is extremely slim, I might as well make my own versions.

Name: Stone, Arthur M. SN: N/A
MI-6 Liaison
Birthplace: Cardiff, UK Grade: O-2 Equivalent

Stone is a former SAS commando who saw combat in Northern Ireland, Kuwait, and Yugoslavia in addition to numerous classified operations. Resurfaced as an MI-6 operative and served as both a field agent and in a consulting capacity. Stone’s time with MI-6 resulted in an extensive network of intelligence contacts worldwide, as well as an intimate knowledge of most of the political and military crises of the past 20 years. The British government and MI-6 have sanctioned Stone’s participation in Operation Mongoose and have authorized him to utilize all departmental resources for operational purposes.









This guy was the first figure I finished, but he's still one of my favorites. I got the idea of the basic character design from the Sigma Six figure after noticing the Sgt. Stone head floating around in my fodder box. I declined to give him an eyepatch for a couple of reasons: one that'll make more sense once some of the other characters have been introduced, and also because both Pierce and Bludd have eyepatches, and having three out of eight figures in the wave missing eyes seemed like an over-representation of monocular soldiers.

“Cobra”
Terrorist
Nationality: Unknown; believed to be American Birthplace: Unknown

Excerpted from Kenneth Rich’s threat briefing: “The terrorist known as Cobra is in the right line of work: based on what we’ve been able to discern, he’s a frightening man. We don’t know much about him, but after extensive voice analysis of the few unaltered recordings that exist, our linguists believe that he was educated somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. His lack of an identifying accent is disturbing, because it appears that it is an intentional, adopted speech pattern. The other aspect of our voice analysis wasn’t any less scary: the recordings he released to the press after his series of attacks in Eastern Europe exhibit a calm, disaffected tone, but our voice-stress people were able to pick up variances in the timbre: he’s not just doing these things for money; he’s doing it out of anger. In other words, even though we’re fairly certain he’s carrying out some of these terrorist acts for hire, he’s got a personal investment in the carnage, too, and it doesn’t seem to be focused on any particular ideological target.

“Cobra takes credit for some of his attacks, but not all of them. He also seems to take a scorched-earth approach to hired help: every attack is accompanied by a string of corpses that can take months to link back to him. There are probably dozens of as-yet-unsolved murders around the world that he’s responsible for. We’re also starting to suspect that he’s been focusing his attention on Europe for so long as a way of throwing us off his eventual goal: attacks on his home soil. Again, these are unsubstantiated claims, but some of the people that we believe him to have worked for are known opponents of U.S. foreign policy, and the fact that his attacks have remained at a relatively small scale doesn’t fit the pattern of a motivated individual with Cobra’s level of competence. He’s biding his time and planning for something big, and there are other trails of bodies that we haven’t been able to find links for that speak to this.

“Aside from our theories, we know that Cobra is an expert with explosives: many types, many techniques. It’s clear that he’s aware of his skill, given the complexity and almost ostentatious display of craftsmanship that his devices demonstrate. Based on what we’ve seen from the few surveillance videos and first-hand accounts of his attacks, he also seems to be proficient with small arms. His tendency toward loose-fitting clothing makes his build difficult to determine, but we believe that he is a below-average hand-to-hand combatant (illustrated by his avoidance of close confrontations in the available video and his lack of patience in resorting to gunfire as a deterrent). He’s highly intelligent, careful, and driven: as I said, frightening.”

Name: Bludd, Sebastian F.
Mercenary
Nationality: Australian Birthplace: Sydney, Australia

Excerpted from Kenneth Rich’s threat briefing: “Bludd served in the Australian SAS and the French Foreign Legion before turning to a career as a soldier of fortune. He operated in Africa and the Middle East for years and has a working knowledge of customs, dialects, and geography that puts our best people to shame. To make matters worse, Bludd is an exceptional soldier: he’s extremely skilled in CQC, an expert in small-arms armaments, a noted marksman, and a borderline strategic genius. He’s something of a warrior-poet: he sees combat as the last true level playing field, and he considers a person’s conduct on the field of battle to be the purest representation of their nature. He is well-versed in military history and theory, and displays an aptitude for anticipating an opponent’s actions. He’s an extraordinarily dangerous man, and he’s motivated by financial greed and an unhealthy respect for the glory of combat (a mild dichotomy that he appears to be unaware of).”

Name: “Firefly”
Mercenary/Saboteur
Nationality: Unknown Birthplace: Unknown

Excerpted from Kenneth Rich’s threat briefing: “The search for the terrorist we’re codenaming “Firefly” is the intel equivalent of chasing a ghost. In fact, until recently, we weren’t even sure he, she, or they even existed at all. We started to suspect the existence of “Firefly” when we recognized a commonality to a string of otherwise-unconnected sabotage and industrial-espionage incidents throughout Europe over the last several years. Unfortunately for us, the commonality was a complete and total lack of physical evidence left at the scenes of the crimes. The level of proficiency of these incidents is like nothing we’ve ever seen: between the sophistication of techniques and equipment (most of which would have to be handmade, since we’ve been unable to establish any kind of paper trail for the devices or their component parts), the skill in avoiding detection, and the apparent quality of advance intel on the security and physical geography of the target structures, “Firefly” is without peer.

“Complicating matters was the fact that the methods varied so wildly from crime to crime. We still hadn’t found a reason to link the crimes until one of our people identified a sort of calculation in the apparent randomness of the incidents; essentially, “Firefly” was aware enough of the traditional intelligence approach to information analysis that he/she/it was smart enough to concoct an extremely sophisticated smokescreen. Bear in mind, this is all conjecture, but we’re certain that “Firefly” must be extremely selective about targets, to the point of turning down potential jobs to avoid establishing a discernable pattern. We’re also convinced that “Firefly” has been committing intentionally less-proficient robberies using somewhat similar techniques to throw us off the trail. It’s been nothing but a bunch of tenuous connections and questionable logic…until “Firefly” finally screwed up.

“The recent explosion at a London power facility was reported as an industrial accident, but the equipment failures that led to the blast had a familiar strangeness to them. We were lucky enough to gain access to the facility before the police had a chance to step all over the evidence. In one of the equipment monitoring rooms, we found the bodies of two employees, a male and female, both in a state of undress and both of whom had been killed by a single 9mm bullet to the head from roughly 15 feet away. By dumb luck, we happened to jostle a nearby laptop and discovered that it had been recording on a built-in video camera; the camera’s “on” indicator light was burned out, making it impossible to tell that it was turned on once the power-save feature turned the screen black. After viewing the recording, it appears that the two employees were not scheduled to be in the building, but had stayed after work to…fraternize. The video shows a masked male enter frame, stop abruptly when he notices the two employees (this suggests that he had advance knowledge of the personnel schedules of the facility: given the proficiency of his entry, there’s no way he would have been sloppy enough to be caught off-guard by something so simple if he hadn’t planned for a clear path), and fire two shots from his side-arm. He then collects the shell casings, advances toward the camera to retrieve the two shells (this happens off-camera, but the lack of exit wounds and the sounds on the video indicate that he removed them from the employees’ heads), and continues on.

“We suspect that the destruction of the generator room was intended to cover his entry into a secure room that contains layouts and diagrams of the power-grid structure of a large portion of the city. As yet we haven’t identified a crime that indicates “Firefly” has used this information, but it’s possible that it went unnoticed.

“Beyond that, we have little to offer. We can’t look for consistency of weapons, because “Firefly” never seems to use the same type of gun twice. We can’t monitor techniques or raw materials, because we can’t anticipate what “Firefly” is building or for what purpose it is intended. We can’t even be certain that “Firefly” is a single person: it’s entirely possible, given the variety of knowledge bases required for these crimes, that more than one person is involved. At this point, all we can do is wait, watch carefully, and hope that “Firefly” makes another mistake.”

Interesting concept and execution. I like the idea of a more low-key/real-world Joe/Cobra you're working with here, and everything seem to fit together nicely, both in terms of the figures themselves and their dossier info, particularly "Cobra" and Firefly (because, let's face it, they'd have to be that dangerous). I'd love to see what you'd do with an official comic, novel or film as a platform for this interpretation.

I have to know though, what technique did you use to give the Resolute Duke legs on Stalker and Mercer tall lace-up boots?

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The best and worst part of these customs are that you cannot tell factory from mods. The strap work is amazing, and Pierce's torso mods are insane. Rich's pants look like Dusty's but with the paint removed, and honestly, some of the parts I can't recognize at all. Nice work.

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I can live with Stalker without a beret but one without a mustache seems wrong.

Bludd is probably my favorite of the bunch. He looks so much more opposing than any version we've seen of him before.

Psyche Out is pretty cool take too. Like chad said Pierce's torso looks incredible.

Character bio wise, Cobra steals the show for me although I can tell you gave Firefly some love too.

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these are awesome....

I wanna know as well about the resolute leg with the boot mods, looks like they were made that way,actually all of the figures look like cast parts with no paint added on the basic uniforms.

I really like Rich and FF

Thanks for the comments and kind words! And now, some witty rejoinders (well, they probably won't be witty)....



Thanks! I'm glad you noticed the straps: I used that method on most of the figures, and while it took forever to do, I like the way it turned out. The thing I did with Pierce's chest was probably the most delicate modification I've ever tried on a figure: the collar and flap are actually a heavily-sanded piece of the skirt from a Star Wars Rebel Honor Guard figure (the plastic colors happen to match), and getting the plastic to take that shape without destroying it was enjoyably tense. And, speaking of weird modifications, both Pierce and Rich feature another little trick I had been thinking about since the 25th figures came out: trying to combine the ball-jointed SW-style knees with the double-jointed knees of the modern Joe construction. Rich's pants are Recondo's upper legs with the camo sanded off (same mold as Dusty's; good eye), the kneepads from a Resolute Duke, and the lower legs of an Avatar Jake Sully figure. Describing how I merged the two parts would get confusing, so I'll try to dig up some of my earlier (read: failed) attempts and take some photos. I'll post a parts list for these figures in the next day or so; some of them were made so long ago that I've forgotten what they're made of.



I actually sculpted a mustache onto the head when I first decided to use it, but I didn't like the way it looked. I've been looking at the figure for so long that I don't even miss it, but I can see how it wouldn't read as Stalker. I considered giving him a removable beret, too, but had the same reaction to it that I did to the mustache.



I'm just excited you guys read them. I had a good time writing them, and obviously, Firefly and Cobra got the best end of that deal. The Firefly one was an idea I've been kicking around for several years; I had been thinking about the Italian pulp character Diabolik, and trying to come up with a slightly more real-world-plausible version of the concept of the master thief. Writing Cobra's bio was fun, too: trying to find ways to make these guys a legitimate threat involves some research, and I'm really enjoying it. I learned a bit about some of the theories at work in modern intelligence-gathering recently, and I'm working that into the project as well.




That's a little trick I've been using a bunch with these customs (Bludd and Firefly have the same thing going on). I tried to write a concise description of the process, but it got pretty confusing and hard to picture, so I'll put together a little tutorial in the next couple of days. It's not complicated or difficult, and I've found it pretty useful.

Thanks again for the comments; I appreciate the feedback.

Really good cutoms. The Cobra ones really work for me. I don't think I've ever owned a Major Bluud figure for over 10 minutes but I'd buy an display your version.