About eleventynine years in the making, McFarlane's Li II statue has finally arrived on shelves this month. And here I am to talk about it, because I can't sleep, and it's 4 AM on Thanksgiving day, which is a day I usually set aside to practice my best 'hiding from the inundation of my arriving family' techniques. For example - pretending I'm sleeping, or not answering my door, or setting up my lava gun with eye-locating lazer targeting systemulators. It's a day spent in bed in complete evasion of being social, perhaps with a DVD or some warm trade paperbacks, or if I'm feeling fancy, trade hardcoverbacks. And for this, and my incredible ninja-like wit, I am thankful with a capital 'HANKFUL'.
The keen Li II statue retails for between 20 and 30 bucks. If you were at the comic show I went to this weekend, you could have expected to spend 50 and a small toe, because comic shows have somehow transformed into clutches of wildly greedy, cartoonishly nefarious scalpers twirling the ends of their handlebar moustaches and obese man-children trying to navigate their bodies and bungee-corded longboxes to and fro through small booth aisles like so many red blood cells through their own plaque-constricted arteries. Well, the latter was always true anyhow. But I digress.
You
know the artwork of H. R. Giger - sprawling, dark landscapes of biomechanical
strangeness and eerie sexuality. Either you know his designs for Aliens, or
you know his textural explorations into the theme of, well, sodomy - things
forever going in and out of holes that were never meant to be used as he chooses
to depict them. Museums have been erected to display his works, he's inspired
countless artists, and now, finally, there's a small bit of his three-dimensional
artwork that the average art appreciator can display. Aliens figures aside,
here's something that's far more true to the essence of Giger.
The
Li II is about a foot tall and made of a few varieties of matte plastics. The
most important thing with something as 'fine art' as this is to divorce the
appearance of the statue from the fact that it's actually made of plastic, which
is something that McFarlane has always excelled at. Because of the intelligent
choice of materials used, and lack of mold seams and plastic sheen, it's much
more like an art piece than anything else. Creatively and visually, the whole
work was obviously based on a painting by Giger, so that aspect of it is beyond
criticism. False visual symmetry, lotsa little skulls and fleshy bits, and the
whole thing gives the impression of some kind of industrial pipe organ that'll
spew oil and blood and giblets and quite possibly, Cap'n Crunch. There are multiple
layers of sculpted pipes and details, all assembled one atop the other, giving
this a beautiful impression of depth and internal darkness. It's of the kind
of complexity where you'll see something new each time you look at it.
There
are a few differences between the pictured prototype and this final work, and
there's only one change that's unaesthetic, and that's in the central face.
For some reason, the lips of this face have been flattened out and sculpted
into lower relief. They just kinda looked more realistic when they were sculpted....
right. I'll have none of these flat-lipped women, thank you.
The paint scheme uses much of the same unusual colors that were used on many of the Ash Wood Spawn figures - dusty whites, browns, greys, and for the name plaque, a coppery, rusty hue around the edges. A combination of airbrushing and drybrushing is used for these colors, leaving some of the surfaces smoothly gradated and others scratchy and rough, which works to the advantage of the piece. Some of the roughness obscures the delicacy of the detailed sculpt, but it also serves to highlight it.
Li II is, for all appearances, excellently executed, as well as the first mass-market work of its kind. Figures have emulated statues, and statues have emulated figures, and sometimes in clubs in the city, men and women emulate each other and you get totally confused about who you're supposed to hit on and end up returning home to another night of wonderfully noncommittal internet pornography, but here we have a full-on, unrepentant statue, and it lives up to all long-held expectations. Those few waves of Spawn figures sculpted from comic cover artwork have all built up to this, and I find myself pleased.
