Mr Vortigern
Reported by Geoff on 7th August 2005
I should preface this by saying I’m a big James Jarvis fan – my first vinyl piece was one of his In-Crowd Zombies and my collection includes a lot of his work. I was excited when I heard about his new comic book project Vortigern’s Machine and then saw the early drawings on the Strangco website. So far, so good. Mr Vortigern himself is another nice sculpt from Amos, standing just a little smaller than King Ken and resplendent in his dressing gown and brogues. Both colour ways are individual enough to not seem like a rip-off if you got both.
But the rest of the package is a massive let down. Like many collectors, I think the box is just as important as the toy within it. This looks at best very poor and at worst, amateurish. There’s no explanation of what’s inside and a small window only let’s you view about 1/5 of the figure.
For a figure based on a character in a comic that’s yet to be released, some sort of explanation of the character and the story would have been nice. Maybe even a Jarvis illustration on the back to draw people’s attention away from the god awful colour scheme. And for £35 this is woeful.
Maybe it’s because Jarvis has enough of a following to not need to do it, or maybe he’s just too busy churning out In-Crowd’s (which IMO have also gone dramatically downhill in quality). Who knows, but I think it’s telling that all of the boxes cluttering up my cupboard, Mr Vortigern’s isn’t one of them.
