Thursday, October 06, 2016

Bring back the Bamf!


Every year someone doesn't make me one of these is a crap year, and this year may have been a bit crap already.

My unread pile has gotten dangerously high--I know I bought the new Doom Patrol #1 and still haven't got to it yet. I'm only a couple weeks ahead on homemade posts, I've got a couple backgrounds in various stages of being cobbled together, yet sometimes I still get a harebrained idea for another project. Even if I have no time, no training, and no resources...like that should ever stop anyone. But I had an idea, to bring back the Bamf. The doll, that is.

I have that Nightcrawler panel on a t-shirt (I had thought it was WeLoveFine, but I could be wrong, or it may have sold out.) but it kills me that I can't go to Build-a-Bamf workshop and get my own stuffed version. You can occasionally find one on Etsy, but I haven't sprung for one yet. But I'm mainly about the six-inch scale figures lately, and would love one in that scale. It would ideally be about the same size as some of these little vending machine Care Bears that I've inexplicably had for years.

I did a bit of searching for a 3-D printed version, but came up short. Incidentally, I also did a bunch of searching for a 3-D printed ROM: Spaceknight or a six-inch scale of the Micronauts' ship, the HMS Endeavor. Because the Micros were tiny on earth in the Marvel U, their ship would be as well; and I actually did find a really nice one, but haven't found it for sale anywhere on the sites that print stuff for you. (Earlier this week, I got a fridge magnet of the cover of Micronauts #37, which we blogged about here, sort of, years back. That really made me want the Endeavor, if not tiny Micronauts!)

Doing some more searching, I found the Instructable for "How to make a 3D model from pictures." So, all I'd have to do, is sculpt a Bamf, build a little turntable, take a ton of photos of it, and run it through Visual SFM or something, and hopefully end up with a 3-D model I could send to a service like Shapeways to have made. Then it would just be a matter of finishing it, painting and so forth. Easy peasy...Okay, this may be a project I don't get to for some time. Still, the more I plan out the steps, the easier it would be to actually do, and over time I think it's going to become simpler as the tech improves--it would've seemed like science-fiction ten years ago, now it's merely a question of work. Which I don't have time for, yet, but one can dream.

In regular Marvel continuity, the Bamf doll makes an appearance in Claremont and Nauck's Nightcrawler #1, a direct callback to the panel from Claremont and Smith's Uncanny X-Men #168. Kurt's girlfriend Amanda has one, and so do several of the younger X-characters like Kitty, Illyana, and Jubilee. I always feel like every kid in the Marvel U should have one...

2 comments:

SallyP said...

I HAVE a Bamf doll that my daughter made out of felt. It is adorable. Why the heck Marvel never actually made these, is a conundrum.

Mr. Morbid's House Of Fun said...

I agree wholeheartedly that Marvel's missing out on good money not making those Bamf dolls, especially Disney, since that's their jam. But considering the current state of the X-MEN and the whole film rights issues and the accompanying bad blood between Fox and Disney, I wouldn't count on seeing them made anytime soon.

You definitely make a good point about 3-D printing technology. Hopefully you and I will see the technology made more affordable and readily available for the average consumer, because that would be beyond awesome. Then we could make our own figures......