Was a time, I used to customize some action figures. I never really got into paint ops much, or at least, not paint ops that involved the likeness - I am a shitty detail painter and portrait artist (but goddamned tremendous at paint-aging, I will tell ya). Anyways, Hot Toys - who have pretty much owned the year, toy-wise, with their Masterpiece Series Pirates of the Caribbean figures and now these forthcoming Dark Knight toys - went ahead and let the head of their paint department, JC Hong, demonstrate what he can really do with his tools, when not limited by the inherent down-rezzing of detail that comes with mass production. He took that Bank Robber Joker I was so drooly about a couple of weeks ago, which is already no slouch in the sculpt/paint/likeness department,

and did this.

Bit of a finger-waving "nyah nyah", because of course collectors will never see a product hit the shelves with even close to that level of fidelity (I mean, blink your eyes and you could actually mistake that photo for Heath Ledger). But on a pure fanboy geek level of a guy who dressed down his Millennium Falcon with garbagey sludge water when he was 12 just to make it look like it had really spent some time in space, I'm a' gonna call JC Hong a genius, and that one-of-a-kind paint op a piece of art, and sorta just think about it for a while, cuz it makes me happy.