A big thanks to the MSGiJoe CollectorsClub for letting me know that Ron Rudat has posted a wealth of new images for SK Omega on his Facebook page. Some full color pictures of cast members we know already, and a ton of black and white drawings for characters apparently in the works. Ron Rudat is one of the artists working on this line, and seems to be taking up right where he left off as the artist on G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero back in the day.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m getting a very 80’s and 90’s old school G.I. Joe vibe off this stuff and I LOVE it. Can’t wait to see some actual toy images. Check out the mirrored images below.
IMAGES WERE EARLY CONCEPTS – REMOVED AT REQUEST OF IMAGE OWNER
Wow! These look nothing like the ones we have seen on HissTank. These look so amateurish, they make me worry about the series.
Picture 16 is hilariously disturbing…haha.
I really hope they make that fat guy.
that guy gets paid to draw that stuff?
some of the faces on those pics are just plain awful….moreso the color ones.
that “jade claw” looks like something out of a cheapo coloring book from the dollar store.
This new line might have more females in it then Joe ever had ever, and right in the first wave. Now, lets see these supposed toys…
Awesome! Loving that Kamikazee Trooper. I would totally use ’em as a robot with a monoeye. Also: That fat guy better be called Sloppy Joe. He looks like a Sloppy Joe.
I am excited to see what this line could do.
My favorite characters at this point are definitely Foxtrot and Kira!
I think this other artist has done some great artwork for this line too.
http://totmoartsstudio2.deviantart.com/
It definitely seems to have the possibility of having more female characters than G.I.Joe right from the 1st wave. I also like the helicopter. Hopefully they will release some figures soon.
I must say, while I was a huge supporter of the series when it was announced at Joecon, I’m a bit bored with all the artistic ‘previews’… I just want to see actual, buyable stuff!
I guess I’ve been out of the loop on this one. Are these fan club exclusives? I’m not familiar with SK Omega.
It will take awhile for any of the designs in this line to see the light of day. All these designs need to get turned into tooling which is expensive and takes a long time. I don’t know where they are in the lifecycle, but I would expect a reasonably financed operations to take two years from inception to having the first approved prototypes complete.
If I had to venture a guess it would be that the venture is not reasonably financed and that the plethora of images we are seeing is designed to get financing for the creation of tooling.
That’s not to say that the project won’t happen or be successful. I hope it is; I love me some old skool Joe-type stuff. That’s just how product development at start-ups work.
To clarify: I mean it will take awhile for character designs to be approved, tooled and then a final prototype approved for mass production.
The previous art looked interesting, but this looks like several steps back, i’ll wait and see the actual product, though
A few of these have potential, but I get a very strong feeling of someone trying too hard to create characters intentionally different enough from Joes, to a point of being almost generic, yet still way too overdone. The majority of these guys come off as more like 4th string SHIELD or X-villains/support characters than as characters who have a solid enough look to stand on their own.
In many ways they remind me of the GI Joe DEA/DEF/Battle Corps/Sgt. Savage/Extreme era stuff that Hasbro did. Some of those were decent, but so many were extremely lackluster that they just came across as trying too hard and yet, not trying hard enough at the same time. Of course, I also feel that a significant portion of the Sigma 6 stuff followed the same pattern as well, with only a few things actually being very creative at all in that line, while at the same time trying to be somewhat like the 80’s were without duplicating anything design-wise.
I do wish these guys success with their line, whenever it may see the light of day (though I don’t foresee too much retailer support having these toys alongside stuff like GI Joe/Star Wars/Marvel or DC Heroes, etc., in places like TRU,KMart,Walmart and so on). Really, what I see from the vast majority of these designs, is a line that will end up more along the path of the Corps figures as they currently exist, at best. They [The Corps!] have decent looking package art now, and figure headshot art (same artist who did the box art for the DTC/S6 RHINO and ROCC, as well as artwork for the TopCow Hunter-Killer/CyberForce comics), but the actual toys are mostly terrible. At least the old stuff Lanard did with the Corps! was compatible with the O-ring figures for customization purposes or just general interaction. This SK stuff feels like a very generic attempt to do GI Joe without doing GI Joe at all, sort of.
The really terrible aspect to consider is simply this: If the character design artwork isn’t getting that much positive reaction, and with that being the simplest aspect to look cool for promotion purposes (this applies to Renegades too, as well as virtually anything else along these lines of production), then we really have to hope that the figure sculpts and gear are just super fantastic, not to mention leaps and bounds beyond the art designs being shown to spark interest currently. I fear that the reality may be that the sculpting, colors, articulation, and concept in general is going to be extremely lackluster, bordering on very disappointing, and these existing designs will end up as the highlight of the entire line, which would be sad.
That being said, I sincerely hope that they re-evaluate several of these characters and do some much needed redesign before getting too far into the tooling aspect of things…