Back to BIONICLE! I've been a fan since just about day one for this series. Today's comic comes from a series of McDonald's "Happy Meals" that featured the series in late 2001. I would travel from restaurant to restaurant to make sure I got one of each character - the original six Toa aside, these figures are probably the oldest in my collection.
There's an interesting dichotomy evident in this comic (as there is in so many toy-based properties). On the one hand, the characters need to look like the physical objects they're advertising. Unlike a comic based on a purely intellectual property, there are actually objective appearances and structures for these characters. If you want to use the comic to sell toys, the characters have to look like the toys so that someone playing can insert themselves into the narrative.
(A side note - I hurt my back really badly yesterday, so I'm a bit hopped up on painkillers right now. Just in case something doesn't make a lot of sense.)
On the other hand, the figures themselves are not particularly articulated, so an artist has to take some license with how the character can move in the virtual world of the comic book. D'Anda, of all the artists on BIONICLE, strives to create a bridge between characterization and cleaving to the toys. His characters do look like their toys, even down to the connectors that stand in for hands on the early models - however, their arms bend, their necks twist, in ways that the toys, this early in the line, cannot do. Later artists offer far more stylized versions of these characters, perhaps speaking to the popularity of the line in that it no longer had to look like the toys in order to sell them.
D'Anda continues for quite some time, so it'll be interesting to see if his depictions of the characters become more stylized too as we get further and further into the story. With that, more BIONICLE tomorrow!
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