| HI-Q
PROJECT #201
CLASSIFICATION: KITBASH
BASE FIGURE: ALPHA COMMANDO ROBOCOP
MATERIALS USED: HOBBY KNIFE, MODELING PUTTY, SCULPEY MODELING COMPOUND,
ACRYLIC PAINTS
FIRST APPEARANCE: TRANSFORMERS #42
"If we leave Cybertron now, it really will
destroy itself! Only the Last Autobot can save us!"
Preamble: In the Marvel Comics stories,
Hi-Q was the leader of the Nebulans. After several Autobots traveled
to Nebulos in order to construct a new body for Optimus Prime and inadvertently
ingested tainted fuel that would eventually destroy them, Hi-Q agreed to
save Optimus Prime by undergoing the Powermaster process, enabling Hi-Q to
transform into Prime's new engine component. As a result of this fusion,
Prime and Hi-Q began melding together to form a single being, but after Prime
sacrificed his life to defeat Unicron, the process completed itself in Hi-Q's
body. Hi-Q, now sharing a life force with Optimus Prime, was instrumental
in helping the Neo-Knights recover the Last Autobot, who provided Hi-Q with
a new Transformer body and enabled him to defeat the Decepticons attempting
to conquer planet Klo.
Naturally, the Powermaster Optimus Prime toy from
Hasbro came with a Hi-Q figurine, but the Nebulan partners were only around
two inches tall. After completing larger-scale kitbashes of the other
members of the Neo-Knights team, I wanted to have a representation of Hi-Q
that was to scale with these figures, so I created a larger version that
looked a bit more like his comics incarnation. (Yeah, I know he's not
really a Neo-Knight. If you want to get technical, this is a
kitbash of Optimus Prime. But anyway.)
I wanted this project to be a representation of
Hi-Q as he appeared late in the comic series, so I based it on Andy Wildman's
interpretation of the character. This artist drew his exo-suit in a
more humanoid style than most others, and he didn't bother to draw that massive
engine-shaped backpack. And, naturally, I had to give him the Captain
Picard hairdo.
Construction: I started with a
RoboCop toy from the Alpha
Commando toy line; it was the size of the other Neo-Knight projects I'd
done, and looked reasonably like a Nebulan exo-suit. It was an electronic
toy (his eyes lit up and he made noises when you pressed a button on his
chest), but it was a silly feature so I took him apart and gutted the
electronics. I replaced the head with the one from Mini-Me from the
Austin Powers toy line (I used the body for another project, but I
wanted the head for Hi-Q since it's already bald). I had to cut off
RoboCop's head and attach the new head just above the neck, since I wanted
to preserve the neck articulation. I cut away at the collar to make
it more square-shaped, and I also did a lot of slicing away at the legs to
give him the appearance of segmented armor on the backs and insides of his
legs.
The new chest panel is a piece of scrap plastic
that I attached to his chest, also adding some pieces of scrap plastic that
I cut down to size and glued in place. The new components on his hips
and knees were from a Gundam Wing Heavy Arms model kit (it broke after
it took a tumble off the shelf, so I figured it would make good kitbashing
fodder). I added Sculpey to the forearms to give them a more squared-off
shape, and the new hairdo is Sculpey, too. I also added some modeling
putty to fill up seams in his armor, as wall as the gap between his body
and the new chest plate.
The helmet was the trickiest part of this project,
and it's the first time I've completely scratchbuilt anything for a project.
Originally, I was going to just use this Spider-Man motorcycle helmet
I had and glue some other stuff to it, but I misplaced the helmet and finally
gave up after searching for it for a few days. Instead, I tried to
make use of the armor parts that came with the RoboCop toy. The helmet
and backpack were built out of six different pieces of plastic, which I had
to cut and fit and glue together, using putty to fill in the gaps. The
visor is a piece of blue transparent plastic I got from a pair of 3-D glasses.
The backpack accessory snaps to the back of the helmet. Painting
Hi-Q was pretty easy, especially since this was one of the few times I could
just use paints straight out of the jar.
Comments: With the helmet on, Hi-Q
stands at about 5½" tall, and looks great on display with the other
Neo-Knights. |
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