I suppose I should put in some words about why Power Girl is a bad-ass. Well, she's Superman's cousin, but she's from pre-Crisis Earth 2, so she's a bit tougher than her normal universe counterpart (or Superman, for that matter). She's always had a slightly grumpy, tough as nails attitude. She was a feminist all the way back to her first appearance, even constantly giving lip to the older, more established members of the Justice Society, which was still pretty daring back in the 70s. She never hung on her cousin's coattails as Supergirl did, nor did she ever spend any considerable time or effort pining over or being dependent on a man. She always dressed however she wanted, being distinctly her own hero, eschewing the famed "S-shield" and feeling no shame in showing off her body. She even survived the Crisis, and that took out almost the entirety of the DC Universe. But most of all, she once kicked the ever-living crap out of Wonder Woman just because she could, and that has earned her entirely my most sincerest respect and appreciation.

This is hands-down, the hardest figure I've put together yet. I put more work into this one than I did with my G'nort, and at the time, that seemed like quite the undertaking. This Power Girl figure consists of a Toy Biz body, Kenner limbs, and a resin custom-sculpted head based on the Mattel JLU line, all of which are quite incompatible with one another. It took a lot of work to make everything fit together right and function properly.

I wanted to build a Power Girl figure because despite her many years of existence and fairly high profile, she's never received a figure of her own in the 4.5 inch scale, a most egregious slight! Not even in the JLU line, and they made everybody! I knew she was going to be a tricky one though, because Power Girl's body type is more busty and curvy than the average super heroine, so that severely limited the figure body options available. Mattel always designs its female figures to be thin and waify (and the JLU sculpts are generally pretty attrocious anyway), so that took the Young Justice and Justice League toylines out of the running. Kenner figures tended to design female characters less curvy and more butch, or else they were exaggerated in the other direction to be too feminine, to the point of being better suited for swimsuit modelling, rather than fighting crime, so they were out too. I needed a combination of a strong, muscular look, while at the same time, an abundance of generous curves. Thankfully, the X-Men line from Toy Biz (and the comics, for that matter) never shied away from either steroids OR boobs that appear humongous to the point of looking artificially enhanced, so I had something in the right approximate scale left to work with.

I decided to go with an older version of Power Girl's costume, the one she used through parts of the 70s and 80s, as although her more familiar costume is much more iconic, I've always found the hole in her costume over her boobs to be just a little bit on the ridiculous side, and perhaps a bit sexist and exploitative too. This costume is much more toned down in terms of raw sexuality, and easier to take seriously.

The next trick was finding a properly proportioned Toy Biz figure in a fairly neutral stance. This makes it easier to swap parts out, but Toy Biz LOVED to sculpt their female figures in sexy poses, so this added to the challenge. Finally, I stumbled upon the La Lunatica figure, of which there are too many, and they are plentiful and cheap on Ebay. The La Lunatica figure has a straightforward, neutral pose, a generous chest, and a strong, and muscular look about her. Once she arrived, I quickly discovered the incredible difficulty involved in disassembling her body. That damnable head with the Peggy Bundy hair.

Anyway, I'd looked around for appropriate parts to use for limbs, but nobody made gloved arms, except for the Toy Biz Scarlet Witch, and that one was just scaled wrong, and posed wrong for Power Girl. I'd ordered some booted JLU female legs, but they too turned out to be considerably too small and thin to be used with La Lunatica's torso, so they were out too. After a little experimentation, and gaining a feeling of confidence in my ability to do so, I decided I would just use appropriate plain limbs and sculpt on the gloves and boots. La Lunatica's legs were out: Toy Biz tended to scale their figures too big, to about 5 inches, so the legs were too long and threw off the figure's scale. I had some leftover Ripley legs from the Kenner Aliens line, and they had the right general height, width, and shape to match the torso, so I went with those. I was originally going to use the La Lunatica arms, as they were nice and muscular, but one arm was a straight-arm one-piece, while the other had an elbow joint, which just made it look terrible, so I added Magic Sculpt to the arm, to make it one fixed piece and make it better match the other, but when it was all said and done, I decided the arms just made the figure look too big and man-ish. The femininity just wasn't showing through. So I chucked those arms and used my Ripley arms as well, as they restored the look of femininity and fit the body pretty well.

Okay, now I had to make everything fit. I had to sand the ever-living Hell out of the Ripley legs to make them look plain and get rid of the pockets and gun-holder details. That took some time and caution. I had to sand down the arms as well, to get rid of the shirtsleeves and her crazy monster-watch. And of course, I had to sand down La Lunatica's body as well to get rid of that crazy-looking bra and the other details that stuck out. Of course, by no means did all of these pieces fit. In order to properly align the Ripley legs on the Lunatica torso, I had to completely sand off her hips, fill in the leg holes, and drill new ones where it would make the leg snugly and naturally match the body better. This done, I then had to completely resculpt her hips on her. That wasn't the end of it. The buttcheeks on the Ripley legs still did not at all align with the buttcheeks on the Lunatica body, even with proper alignment, so again, I had to sculpt on to the body to even that out and make everything match. I can't remember if I had to create new joints for the arms or not, I just recall that the legs were a Hell of a lot of work.

I sculpted on the boots and gloves. As I recall, I was painting as I was building, in order to better keep the details clean, and not have sloppy areas by painting after the figure was already assembled. I had to permanently attach the head to the body BEFORE I could pop in the limbs and seal the body up, due to the nature of the neck joint I'd created. I had to slip the little metal rod through the hole in the neck on the torso, THEN glue that rod permanently into a hole I'd drilled in the center of the neck on the head. I'd bought a JLU-style custom Power Girl head from Geek Variety Customs (they had an entire Power Girl custom figure kit for sale, and it looked pretty good, certainly would have saved me a lot of effort, but it was really a non-moving, non-posable action-statue, not an action figure, so I skipped the entire body and just picked up the head) so I painted up that sucker and attached the head to the body. Although that wasn't too difficult, I had to detach the head, fill in the peg-hole, re-drill the peg hole, and try to assemble again a few times, because for some reason I was having a heck of a time getting the head to align to the body properly. As I recall, this was at least in part from the expansion of the Gorilla Glue I was using, as it would move the head and neck joint slightly as it pushed out. In retrospect, I didn't even realize that Power Girl was drawn with curlier hair throughout most of the 80s while she wore this costume, but had I realized this ahead of time, I probably would have skipped ordering the custom head and gone with a different, more interesting head sculpt entirely, probably something off of an old Kenner figure. Having to seal in the legs and arms to the body before the body was done and painted, in order to sculpt back on the hips (and butt) really added to the challenge.

Anyway, once everything was finally assembled I finally got to painting the entire figure and sealing in the paint with Dullcote and acrylic sealant. This was the figure that got me into the habit of wearing gloves while I paint my figures, as I quickly discovered just how much that white paint will pick up every little bit of dirt and muck on your fingertips, even if you can't see it. Finally, I glued on an old JLU Supergirl cape I'd had lying around. Then I just stopped. I don't know why. I just didn't touch the figure for a few weeks. Finally, I decided it was stupid to have put in so much effort to something only to stop before it was finished and just leave it lying around, so I repainted the neckline of the shirt slightly, to better fit the cape and clasps, then I broke out the Magic Sculpt and sculpted on the cape clasps. I'd painted yellow on a white circle sticker and permanently attached that to the belt I'd painted on, but that just kind of looked flat to me, so I decided to sculpt on a new belt buckle on top of that. Finally, I painted up the clasps and buckle, resealed the figure and was done.

As it stands, my completed Power Girl figure is scaled just about right for the Super Powers line, scaled SLIGHTLY taller than other female figures (thanks mostly to the slightly larger La Lunatica torso), but still shorter than the male figures, so she's just about perfect. Also, her body is slightly bigger than most other female figures in this scale, but again, she's a musclebound Kryptonian powerhouse, and still small enough and feminine enough to not look out of place, so I'm happy.