after seeing the character's reappearance in recent transformers comics, watching the monsterbots' 1980's tv-commercial [link] , learning of the supposed dangers of the toy's sparking feature [link] , and looking into which G1-figures had the best / most articulation, i made my offer on a G1-Repugnus... and apparently saved 49% off of the buy-it-now price.

being the admittedly addicted collector i am, the arrival of this '87 Repugnus in excellent shape caused an almost-immediate nostalgia-toy-gasm which, honestly, felt like a little more than that. this "Repugnus-experience" led me toward a somewhat clearer picture of one of my chief goals as an artist. while i marveled at the design of previous recent buys, like the henkei minibots, it took G1-Repugnus to pull together what is, even in these vaguest of terms to follow, one of my chief goals/themes in artwork, whatever the medium.

most readily in a short film whose pre-production i've been sitting on forever, but also in my drawings and comics, i've wanted for a long time to convey a certain... something about toys and toy-culture, something that made more tangible the stock you put into your childhood stuff... the suspension of disbelief that made you zone into sears-catalogues and the fold-up picture checklists that came in your transformer boxes, even though you knew they were all sets with posed-toys that were mis-tranformed [link] .... and it's not exactly the "awe", "sense of wonder" or all that other stuff -- however credible -- that some people or the now-no-chinned george lucas may suggest.

upon handling, smelling, transforming and playing with this toy, i remembered things i didn't even know i'd done or forgotten i'd experienced. i remembered that my childhood best friend had owned one and that i didn't know or think much of the character then. repugnus' blockiness and the toy's size, the relatively simple design that was fairly poseable for the time and, to toy-geek out for a moment more: the compromises that were already being made for the franchises' progress (what with hasbro then putting increased poseability at the expense of aesthetics, which lead to the high levels of articulation that were realized toward the end of g2 and the use of ball-joints), ones that made this recent/current golden age of transformer-collecting possible: it all really took me back. easily, immediately. bodily, almost.

this personal "discovery" was in some ways similar to the way in which the vast reach of the internets has afforded us easily accessible tomes of information and research. why, thanks to the internet, i now finally possess an mp3 of a song whose identity remained a mystery that had plagued me for years. (it's peter schilling's "coming home" -- whenever i'd tried to find out about this song in person, most folks thought i was asking about bowie's "space oddity," the bastards). yeah, this experience relates even to the way in which we can now of course much more easily look back on and closely scrutinize and fetishize what we loved in our youth, with scads of websites devoted to this or that. it's similar to the way in which our elementary school friends have contacted us through facebook and how we can now very easily look at our old class photos and see how chubby we were or how in kindergarten, we had a crush on that one girl... before she threw up on herself.

this "Repugnus-experience" was more like a culmination of these things, a sewing together of strands that pointed me in the right direction of what i wanted to say about the toy-and-toy-culture childhood experience. it's not the infantilization naysayers say has accompanied increased online communication, txting and the like, nor is it the bittersweet genuinely tear-jerking shimmery-sheen of a pixar toy-story, however great those may be.

i'm probably overstating the case here for dramatic effect... and i am writing this at 5 in the morning while quite sleep-deprived, but still. hyperbole aside, i do think i'm finally moving toward a clearer understanding of this thematic goal that had been so nebulous before. it's not enough for me to ape a vintage style, everyone can and is doing that. and i've come across and own many o.g. G1 items, so it's not purely affection for a rosier past. this rambling write-up sounds a lot simpler and more streamlined than the dense and thorny thing it was in personal experience and how it appears in my brain. as i'm sure we've all said before and as i've recently discussed with a friend here, there is always something lost when committing the ideas to paper, print or text. just as i hesitate to constrain the simultaneous possibilities posed by a rough pencil sketch by committing the line-art to ink, so too has a lot been lost in committing these ideas to this entry. ah well.

still i finally had the tactile experience... the "feeling" that i'd like my own work to create, cause... or effect, for that matter. now, when i can put on-page or on-screen something that does all that, then i'll be all set.

EDIT: now that i've had a chance to re-read the above.... yikes.
i didn't think this would sound so... grandiose and overblown.
i really must've needed to sleep.

*stands by statement, but hands out grains of salt
to anyone who might have read the entry above*