KR|Origin Review #23: Nar-Apsya

I love getting marginal characters in the KR|Origin line. So, November is actually a kinda exciting month for me - not only I was able to review a heroic cyclops that makes two or three brief appearances in the comics, but I also got a pretty obscure villain with Nar-Apsya^TM!

Aside from liking the idea behind the nature of the character, I’m a fan of how this 19^th action figure prototype in the line looks. It (she... he...?) has got this fantastically odd style to its body that makes you take notice. With its mix of biological and stony elements, when you first see it, you can’t help but wonder what it is exactly.

Details

Name: Nar-Apsya

Subtitle: life-giving snake

Classification: lepidosauromorph reptile

Sex: female (although the sculptural warrior that she animates has masculine features)

Home: Tahron

Era: 520 years before Masq-Lor's time (now renamed Foundation)

Affiliation: Reptonoid

Rank: ensign.

Background

First appearance: KR|Origin #3 - Battle for Tahron: Part II – Bi-Harr’s retribution

Brief bio: as a core member of Sphenorat's serpentine horde, which was made up of the most threatening snakes from across Tahron, Nar-Apsya was endowed with the ability to tap into her master's evil magical powers. Entrusted by Bi-Harr to guard his throne hall in Rokang Tar, she merged with a marmoreal statue during a memorable battle against the Therioms, to generate a diabolical warrior who could challenge the mammalian enemies. By doing so, she was also stripped of her reptilian nature, condemned to never leave the warrior's body and forced to fight using physical strength instead of serpent-like skills. Eventually, Nar-Apsya asked the sorcerer-engineer Loghar to use his magic and technology to clone her, hoping to live again in the form of a snake. However, he could only isolate a few of her mutated cells, which in the future would generate new gruesome reptilian creatures, including the snake warrior Volcrotran^TM.

Articulation

Standard, except that waist, wrists and calves are ball jointed, and the neck is double ball jointed.

Description

Head: resembling a mamba, whose jaws are wide open and reveal the head of a statue inside the mouth. The snake's head is characterised by a coffin-like shape, purplish scaly skin (except on the lower jaw, where the skin is yellowish), solid blue-green eyes with somewhat pronounced brow ridges and four sharp fangs, while the inner marmoreal head has no recognisable facial feature apart from a pair of evil deep-set black eyes

Body: the sculpture is made of a white marble with subtle coloured swirls and veins, and has kind of cube-like, unfinished features. The mamba (which is coiled three times around the statue's trunk, from the hips up to the armpits, with her tail wrapped around the left thigh and her head emerging from the back onto the neck) displays purplish scaly skin on the upper side and yellowish skin on the underside. The figure's torso suffers a bit from looking puffed up, which is not too troublesome to me, because I knew that such an overlay could hardly be executed without this side effect

Wearables: two dark-blue gloves, two dark-blue boots with knee guards, a belt made of dark-blue plates laced together and a black crotch piece.

Action feature

In the comics, by wrapping her fairly large body around the trunk of a headless marble statue that decorates Bi-Harr's throne hall, Nar-Apsya can bring the sculpture to life, transforming it into a fearsome warrior. By default, the figure comes in the snake-plus-statue configuration, but the transformation from combined to separate form is pretty simple, although it takes a little work. First, it's necessary to detach the head, or I should say heads, since there are two of them - the marble one placed inside the gaping mouth of the snake one; the mamba's slightly bendable neck makes this operation easy, while the removable double ball joint allows the sculpture not to show the peg coming out from its neck when headless. Then, the snake's tail, which is also bendable, must be unwrapped from around the statue's thigh. Afterwards, the sculpture's lower body, from the waist down, has to be detached, allowing the snake's rubbery (but not really flexible) coil to slip off its torso. The gloves and the boots must be replaced with marble forearms+hands and lower legs+feet, which match the overall body sculpt and paintjob. Finally, a marble-like skirt piece (which is composed of a flashy belt and a series of bendy flaps decorated with fang-shaped patterns, and is designed to conceal the coloured belt and crotch piece) must be slid around the statue's hips before reconnecting the lower and upper body halves.

Additionally, the snake's head(s) can also be detached and replaced with an alternative mamba head that has a closed mouth and a protruding forked tongue. This is the second version of Nar-Apsya's snake form in the line, after the stand-up variant that came with Origin Sphenorat.

Weapons and accessories

Apart from the limb attachments, skirt and alternative snake head, Nar-Apsya comes with an amazing weapon, which is a black cat-o'-nine-tails. This multi-tailed whip is made up of nine knotted thongs of leather, each resembling a snake and helping give the weapon an overall resemblance to a Hydra (indeed, in the comics, when the warrior drops its whip, this splits into nine living snakes).

Overall, I really dig this figure, I think it came out with a nice design that truly wows me. The snake "armour" works pretty well as a translation of the comic book design into the KR figures style. Yes, perhaps the folks at PoliganToys could have tried harder to adapt the inner shape of the coil to the statue's torso, in order to make it look less puffy, but, honestly, I thought it was going to be worse based on what I had seen in the comics, and in hand it is not really that bad.

KR|Origin Review #22: Gollyop

November starts in a large note with my first KR|Origin review of the month giving you Gollyop^TM!

This first large scale figure in the Origin line gets a prototype in the form of a giant who now fights for peace, but used to be the evilest rampaging monster on Tahron.

Details

Name: Gollyop

Subtitle: cyclopean craftsman and guardian

Classification: reptile of uncertain group

Sex: male

Home: Tahron

Era: 520 years before Masq-Lor's time (now renamed Foundation)

Affiliation: Theriom (formerly belonging to the Reptonoid faction)

Rank: lieutenant.

Background

First appearance: KR|Origin #2 - Battle for Tahron: Part I – The journey begins

Brief bio: an odd one-eyed reptilian creature originally from the mountains of southern Tahron, Gollyop was taught to make honest choices in life by his family, in order to gain respect despite his physical abnormality. He trained as an artisan during his boyhood, but was later forced to leave his home after his body had begun growing to an unusual largeness. Frustrated with the treatment he received from his people, Gollyop was recruited to help bolster the Reptonoid ranks after claiming that he belonged to a race of savage giants. In service to Bi-Harr, he aided the reptilian troops in marauding many villages, but was eventually injured on the battlefield when King Tah-Ron was killed. Expelled from the Reptonoid faction because of his unfitness, Gollyop travelled across Tahron to seek help and, ultimately, forgiveness from the mammalian people. As a result, he joined the Therioms, fighting for peace alongside King Khon-Uhr, and using his great strength and know-how to help construct the two multiversal walls. Soon after Khon-Uhr’s death, Gollyop fell during a battle against his former comrades-in-arms, heroically sacrificing his life to protect the walls he had been guarding.

Articulation

Standard.

Description

Head: he sports a hemispherical, close-fitting brown skull-cap bordered with a number of spikes and worn over a loose dark-blue hood with a single large eye-hole cutout in the centre. On the front, the hood is short enough to expose the wrinkled light-green face partially, including a bit of the broad flat nose and the slightly open mouth, which resembles that of a gorilla and has large sharp canine teeth. On the back, several long rope-like strands of matted black hair emerge from under the hood. The helmet leather straps seemingly run down his cheeks, underneath the hood, and fasten under his chin

Body: Gollyop stands 46 cm (around 18'') tall, only equalling the size of one previous figure in the whole KR universe, which is Tmohrr. His body has been rotationally moulded in a light-green colour and then tinted with a darker green in various areas to give his porous skin more depth. His chest has been sculpted with his neck and shoulders hunched forward, giving him a great menacing ogre-like look. He has a fuzz of black hairs on the back of each hand and on the instep of each foot, as well as long black nails (which are nicely sculpted with lines and chips in them) on his fingers and toes

Wearables: a dark-green leather armour with brown details, two studded metallic dark-green bracelets, two metallic dark-green calf protectors, a spiked metallic dark-green belt and a brown furry loincloth. Some of these components show a nice chain mail texture, e.g., the chest plate that joins the four armour straps, and the parts around the neck, on the calves and on the hips. The amour is a particular highlight and, due to its big size, has tons of little details, including zigzag patterns, braided edges, diamond-shaped studs, buckles (for fastening the ends of the straps), rivets, and an interesting dark-blue eye symbol that looks pretty different from the standard Reptonoid emblem and resembles a more human eye. On the back, the armour bears three mason tools sculpted on (a trowel, a chisel and a hammer... I kinda wish they were removable!) and a loop for storing Gollyop's mace. Finally, each wrist/shin guard is ornamented with a triangular dark-blue gemstone.

Gollyop's stylised armour.

Action feature

The centrepiece of this figure is the head, particularly the eye. It has one of the most proper action features in a KR figure, since it's not simply based on part swapping, but involves an actual change in Gollyop's eye appearance (and, to some extent, in his personality) by turning the skull-cap. The funny thing is that I can't pick a favourite among the three options: the daytime eye (with a slit-like pupil and an amber-yellow iris) has to be respected as Gollyop's standard, in my opinion, but the night-time (with a widened, round black pupil) and evil-days (with a slit-like pupil and a heavily bloodshot iris) eyes are equally exciting.

Additionally, the figure gives us a little more fun in the guise of two alternative rotating eye-drums. The top of Gollyop's head (including the skull-cap and the hood) is removable, allowing us to pop it off and place another drum with three new amusing eyes onto the figure. One drum shows a human-looking green eye with heavy eyeliner and villainous lashes (reminiscent of the main character of Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange), a blank glow-in-the-dark eye that can be painted at will (like with a Daruma doll) and HAL 9000's signature camera eye. The second drum displays Leela's eye (with a blue iris), an unsettling clown-like fiery eye and an empty bony eye socket.

Weapons and accessories

Apart from the two alternate eye-drums, Gollyop comes with his enormous mace. This is basically a long, thick knotty wooden shaft with a heavy head on the end, which is also made of wood and is reinforced with a number of flat greenish slabs of stone. Although beautifully sculpted with gashes and pockmarks from plenty of use, there is a bit of an issue with this weapon on my prototype, as the handle is made of a softer plastic and was a bit warped in the package. I think I straightened it out, but I would have preferred to get this mace in a stiffer plastic.

Overall, Gollyop is one of the nicest large rotocast figures I own and I consider him essential to my KR collection. He received a nicely sculpted figure with a cool bonus feature. Every single part of him is so interesting in terms of detail and I really love how fierce he looks coupled with his bloodshot eye. Plus, his articulation matches the line’s standards. On top of that, from a characterisation standpoint Gollyop is one of my new favourite characters - he used to be a big bad reptilian guy, so he is automatically cool.