I don't remember what it was that got me really wanting a Static figure, but I did. Maybe it was the fact that I already had Black Lightning and Black Vulcan and felt like completing the set. Maybe it was that the Subway sandwiches kids meal Static Figure fit so nicely in the scale of the Justice League figures, aside from the fact it was a brick and it looked like crap. Maybe it was sheer amount of good looking young heroes finally committed to the 4.5 scale during the short-lived Young Justice series. Probably it was just because out of all the Milestone heroes that launched with the company's initial release, I thought he was the only one that really truly worked... but fast forward a few years to where he'd gained quite a bit of recognition, popularity, and marketability, it really felt that the glammed-up, dilluted Static of today was a mere shadow of his former self.

Every few years, one of the companies putting out comics creates a very relatable, down-to-Earth, easy-to-identify-with, working-class superhero. Unfortunately, as their popularity takes off, they never stay that way. Going all the way back to when Superman was created, just a normal immigrant kid that was a little tougher than most, no flight, no crazy Kryptonian powers, just a guy that was really strong, very durable, fast, but not time-traveling fast, and able to leap great distances. Then his powers got bulked up and his series went way more crazy-sci-fi and he had super-cousins, and super-pets, and he was the most powerful thing in existence and he just wasn't relatable anymore. Then there were the next batch, the silver age Flash and Green Lantern, and of course, Spiderman. All of them were pretty much normal guys with normal problems, that just happened to have powers and a feeling of responsibility to do good with them. The nerdy lab-rat that was always running late, the paycheck-chasing pilot with women problems, and the high school nerd that never had two dimes to scrape together and could never find acceptance quite anywhere. Of course, give it a few years and one hero becomes the time-travelling, ultra-scientifically-advanced virtual God of the speed force, the other becomes a fairly minor player in a much larger space opera, and the kid that used to have to sit in the laundromat wearing nothing but his mask and his boxers while he waited for his costume to get clean, or that used to take the bus across town to fight crime, is suddenly married to aspiring Hollywood starlet, and has the resources to blow on building crazy silver spider armor, which will only serve to look neat on the chromed cover of the issue and will then be blown completely apart within a single panel.

Anyway, Static, when he was created, was a breath of fresh air. Once again, we had a normal, working-class kid that stumbled into having powers and felt the need to put them to use. His costume was functional- nothing fancy, but it served its purpose. Black longjohns with a very basic lightning bolt design running down them, a yellow coat he probably had sitting in his closet, and a run-of-the-mill Malcolm X baseball cap (which were actually pretty common at the time).

I always hated how flashy Static's costume got over the years (kinda like with Spiderman, kinda like with Superman, kinda like with The Flash and Green Lantern... heck even the Hulk is obscenely overpowered and unrelatable these days) and I also never took a liking to his new moniker "Static Shock" which everyone has taken to calling him. No, he's just Static. Anyway, I wanted to make a figure of the guy that I always thought was pretty cool when created, but is largely forgotten now, at least as he was when he was created.

The base of the figure was an extra Kid Flash figure I had laying around, and I thought in terms of costume, he worked. I don't know why Young Justice figures consistently go so cheap on Ebay, they were a pretty nicely sculpted line, and ironically, a high price-point was what killed the line in the first place. The head came off of an old Starting Lineup figure, a worthless toyline if there ever was one, but the baseball cap was decently sculpted on him, and any time I can make something worthwhile out of a Starting Lineup figure, I'm happy. I didn't do a complete body disassembly as I normally would, since Kid Flash's head is on a balljoint and pops right off, and the body perfectly suited my needs. I just chopped off the ball-players neck and drilled up into it, to allow it to properly accommodate the ball joint on the neck. Hot glue finished the job.

Painting him initially was quite easy, though as I would find out, making him KEEP the paint on was considerably more difficult, and slowed down this project greatly. Something about the type of plastic Mattel used for the limbs, it just didn't want to hold the paint. I eventually got past that. Finding a character model for Static was also essential since most of the art on the original Milestone books was sketchy at best, and I needed to get a good idea of what Static was supposed to look like. Thankfully, I was able to find one.

The hardest part, by far, was figuring out the coat. I was looking around for a while, a month, maybe two, just trying to find something that had the right look. I knew early on I wanted a removable coat for my Static figure, because I liked his base costume, but I wanted his complete look too. I was looking a removable accessories from similarly scaled toylines, doll clothes, Barbie clothes, anything that looked like it might do the job. Because Static's trenchcoat has a hood on it, my choices were considerably limited. Eventually I stumbled on the X-Men movie Rogue figure with removable hooded coat. I knew it was going to be over-scaled, and it was the wrong color, but it looked like something I could maybe make work.

I got my hands on a Rogue figure I'd bought decently cheap from Ebay, chucked the doll over to my girlfriend's kid (who quickly got to work posing it doing weird things in her Barbie dollhouse bathroom) and I got to work on the coat. I quickly discovered RIT dye remover was completely useless on whatever material the coat was made out of. Believe me, I tried. Going for broke, I then tried washing the coat in an absurdly potent concentration of bleach. Nothing happened there either. The coat looked good as ever, which was weird, because the bleach HAD eaten the black buttons off of the outside of the coat. I still don't know what that coat is made from, but I wish I did, because I want my entire wardrobe made from that stuff.

I trimmed down the coat to dimensions more befitting a rather petite 4.5 inch figure, and manually hemmed it by hand. Finally, knowing no better option (and knowing fabric paint would make it just as stiff) I built a frame out of old Slurpee straws to put the coat on, and then hit it with a few layers of spraypaint. This, of course, stiffened the coat up considerably, so I then put the coat through some other processes to try to soften it up as much as possible (putting it through the wash, boiling it in a pot as if I were working with plastic, mashing it in my fingers). It's still stiffer, but that helps the hood maintain shape, and it's soft enough that I can get my figure into it.

Anyway, Static! The cool one!