Review: The Zoom #10

Earlier this year I organised a comic con for my children's primary school. You can read all about it here. Since then my (youngest) son has been pestering for another one. I'm no longer Chair of the PTA so I told him he should start a petition and if he got enough names I'd look into it for him. I didn't expect him to survey his entire school, but he did and the result is that I'll be starting asking the current Powers That Be with permission to proceed in the next week or so.

However, as is often the case with these reviews, I'm drifting off the point.

The point is that one of the guests at the con was Zoom Rockman. I was mighty impressed that we managed to get him since I'd actually heard of him. He'd been featured in an article (I want to say on the BBC website, but I can't remember exactly where it was now) about the comic he produced himself and how it had resulted in him getting work on the Beano. This is pretty impressive in itself, but the fact that Zoom is 13 years old raises the achievement to the next level.

Issue 10 popped through my letterbox yesterday morning and I sat down with a cup of tea and a biscuit for a read.

Review: Doctor Who Impossible set

When it was first announced that Character was changing the scale of their Doctor Who figures to 3 3/4" there was panic. Would this render long-time collectors' figures obsolete? What would happen about the new characters? Would we never get 'old scale' figures of new characters such as the 12th (or 14th, depending on your numbering) Doctor and Clara?

Turns out that we collectors are safe. Thanks to Underground Toys the 5" line continues, albeit in a lessened form compared to the 3 3/4" 'main' line. So while we won't get figures of every character in the current series of Doctor Who (Strax, for example, is looking very unlikely) we have at least got Clara and hopes are high for a 'proper' Capaldi Doctor (a regeneration figure is on the way to make do for now).

Review: Ninja Turtles 2014 movie figures

Once upon a time in the late 80s/early 90s Playmates made a load of Turtles toys, most of which never reached the shores of the UK. The situation was repeated during the early 00s. These days (the early 10s for those reading in the future) it's not quite so bad and, as far as I know, we're getting most things in a reasonably timely fashion, including the 2014 movie toys which arrived over the summer.

Of course, the movie itself won't be out here until later this month. It was out ages and ages ago everywhere else in the world but we're having to wait. I presume this is so that we'll have forgotten about all the bad reviews it received elsewhere.

As such, during this review I'll be able to tell you absolutely nothing about how these toys relate to their counterparts on the big screen. Instead, I'll talk simply about the toys themselves.

Review: Independence Day

It wasn't often that I walked the aisles of Toys R Us in the mid-90s. As a teenager, this sort of activity, despite the amount of joy and happiness it can bring, is frowned upon. As a teenager giving everyone else any ammunition of any kind to fire back at you is not a good idea. And, hell, everyone else already found plenty of things to fire at me without handing them more.

Quite why I was in TRU that day, I don't know. It may have been to actually find a present for a younger person (instead of the 'I'm here to buy a present for my younger brother!' lie you may sometimes give to staff/other customers when they look at you strangely when studying toys on the shelf). I was walked past a big display of figures, paused to look at one, and was quickly told 'You're not having one of those' by my mother.

The 'one of those' she was referring to was an Independence Day alien figure.

Toyology Review: NERF Zombie Strike Crossfire Bow

NERF. Zombie. Crossbow. There is no part of that description that is not AWESOME. You should go buy this now, you hear me?!

Okay, review done.

What? You want more? Fine...

Review: MOTUC Club Etheria Q1

Club Etheria has begun, hoping to increase the amount of Princess of Power figures in Masters Classics before it's demise/reincarnation at the end of next year. It's a line that just happened, missing the minimum subscriptions sold for it to go forward, but close enough that Mattel pushed it through.