Angel & X23 (All New X-Men)

What up everyone. The time has finally come to nail this coffin shut and complete this damn team of time displaced teens! Here is are my final 2 reveals from my custom team of All New X-Men: Angel and X23. 

Completing this team is a huge achievement for me. It essentially marks the end of my original, ridiculously sized “To-Do” list that I made when I started customizing 6 years ago. Back when I was only churning out 6-10 customs a year, this list of 80+ characters seemed like a pipe dream. But here we are crossing off the final few from the list, thus completing my All New X-Men and my OG To Do list. Woo!

Similar to his teammate Iceman, Angel is built on the male teenager base body. I used a head from Miles Morales and some modified wings from the old All New X-Men Boxset Angel. I attached the wings with some Revoltech joints but more on that in a bit. Again, wish there was a bit more variety in this size buck, but it is what it is.  

X-23 is made using pieces from an All New Wolverine (head, torso, upper legs, arms, hands and claws) and Ms Marvel (lower legs). As I mentioned when I talked about Jean, the female teenage body is kind of a gong show to work with. The legs tend to bow at the knees and the foot peg is skinny and brittle. They really need to update this buck, but this is all I had to work with (scale wise - gotta fit in with the guys) so it is what it is.

Much like Cyclops and Jean, I decided to sculpt the details on (rather than simply paint) both for consistency and for ease of masking. One of the challenging things about sculpting these uniforms is that they all kinda look the same, but they’re all very different. When I decided to make them all at the same time I figured it would be easy because what I did on one I would do on all 4 of them, however that didn’t work out at all because nothing was the same. lol. So sculpting was a real pain in the ass on these guys. 

The paint job on these 2 were about as frustrating as the rest of the team (Iceman not included). The design of the suits are just so busy and multicoloured so I ended up doing multiple sessions of masking, which I really hate lol. But im very happy with how smooth and bright the colours turned out. 

My biggest struggle with these figures were Angel’s wings. As I mentioned before, I used the wings from the TRU exclusive All New X-Men 5 pack from way back. The size was the biggest reason for why I opted to go with these wings. The teenage Spider Man buck is significantly smaller than a Bucky cap body, so anything bigger than these would have probably looked out of scale. 

I cut the wings into 2 seperate wings (started together with a solo plug that plugged into the original figures back) and dremeled a hole into them so a revolted joint could fit into the hole tightly. I then implanted 2 reveoltech joints into the back of Angel, allowing the wings to both move independently from one another. Also makes it easy to remove if need be.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

With the completion of Warren and Laura my All New X-Men team is FINALlY done! So grateful to have these guys off the ole’ to-do list and finally represented in my display. Turns out the two characters I was least excited about making turned out being among my fav’s of the bunch (Angel and X23 I mean). Thank you all for popping by and for all your on-going support. Stay safe and don’t forget to vote!