It's appropriate to announce today's (re)painted miniature in the hyperbolic Mighty Marvel Manner of the early 80's:
Ummm . . . who's Firefall?
Firefall is an old and very obscure Marvel comics character, the friend & sometimes foe of his fellow Spaceknight, Rom. My little brother had a subscription to Marvel's Rom series when we were kids, so I got to read them, too. Now that I'm old and wrinkly, I find they have a certain nostalgic charm. But still, why repaint a heroclix Firefall model? Who knows, really? The older I get, the less I understand why I do what I do. But here are two likely contributing factors:
1. The figure was dirt cheap (about a buck.)
2. The original factory paintjob, solid red, was about as lame and uninspired as can be, and there's a strange sort of (perverse?) pleasure in taking something mass produced and crudely painted and turning it into something unique that was painted with care.
I painted the backpack (originally solid red like the rest of the figure) to look like it was actively generating the flames on his shoulders.
In the comics, Firefall wielded the "Living Flame of Galador" (not to be confused with the "Living Flame of Pyro" wielded by another Marvel character) which he could manipulate like a wizard and use to blast foes from a distance. Before he was grafted into his cybernetic armor to battle the evil Dire Wraiths, Firefall was a well-muscled guy named Karas who had long hair and went around shirtless. He looked like Space Fabio. So did the series' hero Rom, before his cyborg conversion. Golden Galador was the planet of the Space Fabios.
I wasn't sure I liked this model that much when I started painting him, and wondered if I was wasting my time, but now that he's finished, I like him a lot. It's interesting how spending the time and care to paint models not only changes how they look, but also how you perceive them.