Funko has gone from a company known primarily for producing those cool-yet-static Pop! Vinyls that cover an extremely wide range of licenses, to being the newest mover-and-shaker on the super-articulated figure front. They created a storm of publicity with the surprise release of Game of Thrones figures through Barnes and Noble (yes, they’re working on their quality control issues) and followed that up by announcing a line of figures based on the The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Magic: The Gathering. That’s the game those guys in the back of the comic store play a lot. You know the guys. It probably involves multi-sided dice. Or something. I don’t know anything about the property, but the toys look cool.
Between their retro-styled line and their super-articulated lines, Funko is now officially the Company To Watch. With such a broad array of licenses, I thought it would be fun to imagine other properties they could produce similar super-articulated figures from. So every once in a while this column will pop up, detailing another property that would make kick-ass toys.
There’s plenty of options. Just pulling from the licenses they’ve acquired the rights to for their vintage line, there’s Universal Monsters, Pulp Fiction, Back to the Future, The Goonies, The Crow, and on and on.
But I didn’t choose any of those for this first column.
Funko has already shown an interest in tabletop role playing with Magic figures, so that led me down the path to a property I know equally little about as a whole, but whose designs have always fascinated me: Warhammer 40,000.
Back when I was in the 8th grade, some dude in my class showed me this strange little miniature that he had put together. It was a funky-looking armored warrior that immediately clicked all my cool buttons. Warhammer is a Games Workshop property about a war in a dystopian future between all types of creatures, demons, armored humans, and so forth. It’s nuts. It’s a huge, massive, sprawling property, with all kinds of media tie-ins. I personally don’t really go for tabletop gaming, role-playing, card games, or any of that stuff, but I can appreciate a good psychotic, imaginative fantasy experience, and Warhammer has all of that by the bucketload.
When doing a bit of research on the different designs, I started to realize there isn’t a non-toyetic character in the bunch. I mean, this guy is the librarian:
The librarian!
If a toy line looks cool enough and has the requisite super-articulation that I need in a toy, then it goes from “sorta cool” to “I have to buy this.” Warhammer toys would appeal to both hardcore fans of the property and, much like the Magic figures, anybody who’s a fan of cool designs and toys in general. I can’t imagine anybody into cool crap turning down some of the whacked-out designs of the vast majority of these characters. And there’s a pretty deep pool to draw from, with decades of backstory and tons of different characters. Many of them are army builders, and the ones that aren’t … well, who’s to say you can’t army build them also? Because these would look great alongside any other 6-inch figure, even as random aliens for another property from a galaxy far far away.
If you go to this link, you can click to see a vast amount of the different designs. Any random clicking will bring up something that would make a cool toy. Case in point, these are a few I happened to randomly click on just based on how cool the name was:
This is the Soul Grinder. I want to play with this. It’s like if Satan, Mojo, and Gary Busey had a kid together.
This is the Soultaker. I’m assuming he brings the souls to the grinder up above. That only seems logical.
These are the Deathwing commandos. How awesome would those be in bulk?
These are the Necron Immortals, or Deathmarks.
And following that theme, these are the Necron Warriors.
And I assume this would be their commander, the NecroLord. Even his name is cool.
And these are the Chaos Space Marines. Because “Order” Space Marines are wussies.
This is only a small sample of the various factions and characters in this world. Do yourself a favor and click that link above to do a little digging — you’ll want to see these in toy forum as much as I do. Hell, I want them now, after doing a bit of research, more than when I first started planning this article. Let’s have some Funko!