The Good and The Bad... (Patreon)

Now I’m probably going to sound like a broken record here and reiterate the elephant in the room…

The helmet is a bit, shall I say... disproportionate(?) to the overall figure. It’s been one of the bigger ‘hate it or love it’ controversies to come out of the custom minifig community lately. When it came to the initial renders, this helmet gave consumers the impression that the final piece would look similar if not exactly like the final product… but possibly the production of it just got the better of PCB this time around.

Who’s to say...

For the sake of comparison, the eyes look much farther apart, the facial plating indentation is all but filled in with the paint, and the upper back end of the cranial dome looks more like a balloon than an Iron Man helmet. Now some of these details could have something to do with how a lot of the piece doesn’t quite cover the plain head. Relatively speaking, it's a comparable size to an official headpiece… but that shaping is, dare I say, kinda funky.

One of my own personal disappointments with it though was that in the initial renders, it seemed to imply more detail on the headpiece (particularly what looks to have ended up as the super subtle indentations of the brow/forehead as well as around the mouth).

The details just got lost, and the silhouette is… well it’s not terrible, but just not what I expected from Phoenix after having to wait nearly eleven months. I will say that it does look a bit better in person, but not nearly as sharp as we were all hoping. Again, comparing it to an official headpiece… it’s surprising, but the official part looks sharper in it’s overall mold.

But now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we’ll talk about print and design translation tomorrow! ;)