One of the good things to come out of Mattel producing toys for the Justice League series and Green Lantern movie was that we finally had access to more than just one Green Lantern figure, and we could finally get about to building our own Green Lantern Corps. Things weren't perfect, of course. The movie figures were hardly accurate to the comics in terms of their appearance, and their scale is a bit on the sketchy side. As for the Justice League series, while we finally got access to a lot of characters that had never been produced before in action figure form, that didn't mean they were produced well. Mattel pretty much phoned in the entire Justice League series, and in fact, most of the male and female figures all recycle the exact same body but with different paint. For that matter, the sculpting in the line isn't particularly great to begin with, and it's really not something you can blame on these being exaggerated Timmverse characters, since Kenner still managed to put out beautiful sculpts while sticking to the same aesthetics back when they had the rights to do so. The Batman Animated Series Riddler is still one of my favorite figures of all time.

But most glaringly, and this is the biggest problem of all, once you've lined up all your Green Lantern Corps members, you'll find there's only one female among the whole bunch. In all the years they've had the license, Mattel has only made one female Green Lantern for the 4.5 scale- a Katma Tui figure for the Justice League series. The Timmverse redesign of Katma Tui wasn't a particularly good one, worse still, the sculpting is terrible on this terrible redesign, but worst of all, of all the female Green Lanterns in existence, Katma Tui is probably the single least interesting, or important. Needless to say, to make a Green Lantern Corps look complete, you're going to need to bulk up the ratio of female membership.

The first choice for me for the first female Green Lantern I would build was Soranik Natu, as she particularly relevant right now, and honestly, I like her a lot. The first thing to figure out was the head, and I knew I wanted to use the head from a Kenner Aliens Ripley figure. It had the right sort of look, and Kenner always did a pretty good job when it came to sculpting. Next came the body, and Soranik's collar made choosing the right torso a tricky one. I could have sculpted a collar on to a collarless body, but in my opinion, most sculpted on details I've seen on custom figures have generally looked like crap, so I decided to use the torso from a 5 inch Catwoman figure from the long forgotten crappy Batman cartoon of the early 2000s, as it already had a collar. I used a dremel tool to sand off the front of the collar, making it a similar open collar to the one Soranik has, as well as sanding away additional unnecessary details that were relevant to the Catwoman sculpt, but not Soranik. Those Batman figures were of particularly poor design, and are closer to statues than action figures, so Catwoman's torso was connected to a solid, single piece that consisted of both legs and her waist. This was obviously unusable for my purposes, so I had to graft a normal action figure set of hips, as well as movable pair of legs, to the upper torso. I used a Young Justice Black Canary figure, which has probably one of the single best female bodies sculpted in this scale. I had to bust out my trusty hacksaw and very carefully cut her torso in half, taking care to cut the lower half to fit the Catwoman torso as best as possible. I also liked the look of Black canary's legs, so I decided to use those as well. All that left was arms, and I decided to just use a pair of Katma Tui arms I had lying around.

I always boil my figures to re-separate their bodies along the seams in order to have maximum ease in disassembly, and considerably better results and mobility in reassembly. I filled in the empty space in the Black Canary hips with some Magic Sculpt, then put a tiny little nail dead-center in that, as that's what the Catwoman torso uses to hold on to the legs. I popped the Katma Tui arms into the Catwoman torso after doing some serious drilling and sanding work on the torso to make the arms fit right, then resealed the body shut with a hot glue gun. Assembling the body prior to painting was practical in this case due to the simplicity of Soranik's costume. It also allowed me to put tiny bits of Magic Sculpt around the area where I'd joined the two torsos, which I later sanded down after it hardened, so that the body had a smoothed out, natural look. After that, I got to painting.

I've never had to do this amount of painting on a custom figure before, but it's safe to say I underestimated how much work it would be. Once that was all dried up, I chopped a bit off of the very long neck from the Ripley figure to make it fit the figure right. I installed a small nail protruding from the base of the neck to give the body something to grip, then squirted a little bit of hot glue in the neck cavity, and shoved the neck into the body, allowing the glue to harden around the nail and hold the head in. Normally, when I'm making a custom I go for full mobility, as I'm making custom action figures, not custom action statues, but in this case I sacrificed the ability of the neck to rotate, due to a number of issues surrounding the complexity of the collar, the shape of the hair, distance between, and issues with how the neck was cut. I needed to get the neck as far back and up against the collar as possible, so as to not look completely misshapen, so that meant it wasn't going to be rotating. Once the neck was attached, I put one more coat of red paint over where the neck and the body joined, just to make sure there wasn't a noticeable gap, and that they looked natural together.

With everything painted, all that left was to put on the Green Lantern insignia, since I sure as heck wasn't going to hand-paint it. I ordered a set of stickers sold on Ebay for people to make their own Green Lantern Lego men, cut out the insignia, and stuck it on her chest where her insignia goes. With all that done, I was finally ready to seal the figure and make all the paint permanent. First, I sprayed the figure with an enamel dull-cote, as I'd painted the figure with enamel, and it made everything nice and flat, the figure looked really good. After that had dried, I sprayed the figure once more with a matte acrylic sealant to give the paint permanence. For reasons I don't really understand, the acrylic sealant gave the figure a glossy look again, which was immensely disappointing, but I sprayed it a few times to even everything out, and when that was dry, I sprayed my figure once again with the enamel dull-cote. That mellowed out the paint again, and the acrylic sealant succeeded in keeping that paint locked in tight, so she was all done.

Finally seeing the figure all completed, I was pretty pleased. From certain angles, Soranik sort of looks like she's tense or shrugging, and I suspect that's because I cut the neck just a little short, and I may have angled it wrong, but the overall placement looks good, and it's not a terribly noticeable issue. The only thing that really sticks out on the figure and bothers me is that with the sleek, smooth lines of the figure's body from head to toe, the funky, exaggerated shape of the Justice League arms really stick out and look out of place, really destroying the sleek appearance of the figure. It wasn't something I noticed during assembly, or prior to painting, but it definitely bothers me now. I suspect at some point I'll build this figure yet again, but with a new set of donor arms, perhaps the Ripley arms, to really maximize on the smooth, sleek look. The Catwoman torso is also leaning to the side a bit (to facilitate her having her arm on her hip), something else I didn't really notice until the figure was done, so a new pair of arms, particularly a set that aren't both extending straight down, would take better advantage of the shape of the torso. A rebuild would also give me the opportunity to try out some new painting techniques I figured out along the way, although I probably won't be doing another one for a while, since finding that Catwoman figure at a decent price isn't an easy thing to do.

Don't get me wrong though, it's still a good figure, and it'll look fine in my collection, lined up against the other members of the Corps. It certainly looks a heck of a lot better than that crappy Katma Tui figure Mattel put out, and they sold that to kids! Some poor kid probably spent their tooth fairy money on it. Although the scale picture I have provided was shot from a weird angle and makes her look a little bit taller than she should look, she is shorter than the Hal Jordan figure, and almost exactly the right scale, although at 5'7, I suspect the figure's a relative 2 or 3 inches too tall. Still a heck of a lot better than that crappy Katma Tui figure Mattel put out, which is WAY shorter than both Soranik AND Hal, despite the fact she's supposed to only be a mere inch shorter than Hal Jordan. That's Mattel half-assing it for you.