Wednesday, September 26, 2012

This Is About Heroclix, But Not The Fan Vote, Relax

It's become a bit of a yearly tradition for me to talk about characters I'd like to see made into Heroclix. And I usually talk about DC in September, then Marvel in October. It's September, so let's get to it.

To clarify, I'm talking about characters that have never been made. There was a DC set a month or two ago, JL52, that had a new Cyborg and a new Enchantress, both of which I'll get around to purchasing eventually. But both those characters have been made before, albeit many years ago. I'm more interested in figures that have never gotten the nod.

Last year, I picked a top 5 of Sand, Terra (the most recent one, Power Girl's friend), the Haunted Tank, Enemy Ace, and the Unknown Soldier. In the last year, exactly none of those characters got made. Sand had a shot, but he lost last year's fan vote to Barda (although as I mentioned over the weekend, Barda's has yet to actually be released, though we have seen the figure and its dial).

That's. . . not great. Admittedly, there haven't been a lot of opportunities. There were a couple of Fast Forces (a box of about six figures so you can put together a team quick and easy) based off earlier sets. There was a set for the Nolan Batfilms, the JL52 set (which had about 20 figures), and the 10th Anniversary set, which had 2 dozen, but many of those were the same character at two different stages of their career. So Barbara Gordon as Batgirl and Oracle. Not always, since one Flash was Jay, the other Barry, and the GLs were Alan and Hal, but there was overlap.

The upcoming Batman set may help a little. Several years after introducing the "Vehicle" keyword with Thor's wagon in Hammer of Thor, they're seriously getting into vehicles with the upcoming Batman set. The Batmobile's a lock, but so is the Invisible Jet, Ted Kord's Bug, and, I believe, the Haunted Tank. I don't know whether it's the M-3 Stuart, or the Sherman they started using later. I hope it's the Stuart, but the way things are going, I better take what I can get.

I haven't heard anything about Enemy Ace, and it may be too much to hope for Rittmeister von Hammer and his Fokker triplane, but with them making vehicles now, there's a chance. The Batman set is also going to include some of the Outsiders, which means we might see Grace and Thunder, who almost made the top 5. I have this desire to put together the short-lived Chuck Dixon Outsiders team, and I need those two for it. There's a Teen Titans set coming out sometime next year, maybe Atlee Terra would show up there. All of that is circumstantial, but hopefully next year's edition will have more good news than this year's did.

No comments: