The Building Chronicle: A Critical Consideration of LEGO's "Bionicle" Series - Building Through part 1.3 - 2001

Whenever I engage in a rebuild of the Bionicle series, I always find myself excited to build the Rahi. They're certainly the most diverse of the villains the Toa (any of the Toa) face over the course of the decade-long first wave and, to me at least, represent a moment early on in the series when the designers were not...well, lazy is the word that springs to mind, though I'll admit that I have no idea of what kinds of decisions lay behind the movement from diverse modelling to clones.

That said, when I actually get to building the Rahi, I get impatient for the model to be done. The Rahi (Nui-Rama, Nui-Jaga, Tarakava, Muaka, Kane-Ra, Manas) are the closest the Bionicle line comes to the Technic line of models from which Bionicle sprang, and their relative complexity is one of the facets that links them to Technic quite fundamentally. We could posit that the Rahi models were actually LEGO's attempt to bring older builders into the Bionicle line in much the same way that the Toa, with their action figure-esque style, would be better suited to bring in younger builders. If I'm anything to go by, it worked. But I still get impatient building them, and I'm not sure why. It could simply be that I've been building and dismantling these models for nearly 15 years, so the shine is off. Regardless, they represent a very interesting, innovative, and unique moment in Bionicle's history.

Early on in the line, the Rahi were relatively difficult to find, and were remarkably expensive, compared to the Toa and Turaga. The expense of these sets might be a reason that the very large sets disappeared for some time from later Bionicle iterations, or perhaps it was the success of the figure-based models that spurred the creation of the "titans" line of villains and heroes, models that still incorporated some Technic elements, but really were very much on the way to becoming Bionicle, as opposed to Technic. But before that happened, we had wild animals to build.

The main series of Rahi are well-known by this point. Giant mosquitoes, giant scorpions, water lizards, bulls, great cats, and giant crabs. All of these creatures were possessed by the Makuta and sent to stop the Toa from locating their Masks of Power. In the comics and books, the Rahi who had been taken over by Makuta were always identified by the corrupted masks they wore. Unfortunately, the only model to have such masks was Muaka. I would have loved to see the Manas or Tarakava with infected masks, though the variety of colours of the original masks that we do get as a result of the colour-schemes of the Rahi is quite wonderful. Of course, bearing in mind the expense of the sets, these masks fall into the realm of the most rare and collectible of the series.

(Note: I haven't yet dealt with the collectability of the generation 1 masks, which seems odd considering this is a collecting blog. I think the masks will require a post all their own, perhaps one that encompasses all of the masks of G1, from the early to the last.)

For this particular build through, the aspect of the Rahi sets that was most interesting for me were the combiner sets. The Nui-Kopen, combiner model of the two Nui Rama, is one of my favourite models of the whole line. While the Nui Rama themselves are individually interesting models, the Nui-Kopen really conveys the sense of malevolence one wants to see from a giant insect.

Missing from this particular build through are the Kuma Nui, combiner of Muaka and Kane-Ra, and the Mana Ko, combiner of the Manas. As both of these sets were very expensive, finding them on the secondary market is difficult. But if there's one thing a collector never wants to see, it's the end of his or her collection - having such difficult quarry to hunt down is part of the draw of collecting as a life. This said, what we do have in these pictures and in this build through are numerous official Rahi that were not sets, instructions for which came through either the LEGO website or the LEGO magazine.

The Mata Nui Cow, or Mukau, is easily the cutest model of the Bionicle series. Of real note here, however, are the Ranama and the Kirikori Nui, two models that not only combine Bionicle pieces, but also incorporate elements of the Bionicle forerunners, Throwbots (or Slizers) and Roboriders. As I noted in the previous post, the dearth of older sets makes building these ones difficult, and my own versions of these two Rahi incorporate most, but not all, of the pieces from the official instructions. When I'm tracking down bits for these combiner models, I'll hit a certain point where I feel that, with the pieces I do have that can be used as replacements, building the model minus some of the "official" pieces is worthwhile. For the Ranama, for example, I am missing two of the Throwbot "gearbox" body pieces in yellow. But that's all, so replacing them with the purple ones that you (might) see in the picture is not a big deal for me as a builder. A few of the combiner models I'll be looking at through this series share similar replacement parts, but that's only until I can track down the right pieces.

I think that's long enough for this post. I'll offer some final thoughts on the Rahi next time, as well as looking briefly at some of the ancillary merchandise that accompanied Bionicle at this early stage.

(Okay, two more. The Kahu (Nui-Jaga combiner) and the Dikapi, which basically is a Bionicle chicken.)

The Building Chronicle: A Critical Consideration of LEGO's "Bionicle" Series - Building Through part 1.2 - 2001

(Okay, so perhaps it's only going to be once a week for this blog ;P)

So we'll jump right in with a consideration of the "good guys" in the beginning of the series. The section of the collection that I'll be focussing on today includes all (I'm pretty sure) of the official models and combiners that represent the villagers, leaders, and heroes of the BIONICLE saga's first year. Of note, I shall be linking to the website BIONICLEsector01, which I consider to be the most comprehensive of the Bionicle wikis online.

BIONICLE (I'm going to stop capitalizing it for the balance of these articles. I know that's the proper way of writing it, but it's a pain in the ass) offers a really interesting post-apocalyptic science fiction story that starts out as a fantasy parsed mechanically. By this, I mean, that the original six Toa who started the story (seen above, left, and below) are the most mechanical-looking off all of the Toa that we encounter through the first 10 years of the series. At this point in Bionicle's history, it is still considered an offshoot of the Technic line, and as such is compatible with pieces from that series. Before Bionicle's release in 2001, LEGO/Technic had experimented with action figure-style sets in the Throwbots and Roboriders series, and the elements that make up Bionicle are fully compatible with those forerunners. Indeed, two of the earliest official combiner models, the Ranama and the Kirikori Nui rely heavily on elements from these earlier series. In the "Prolegomena" to Lego Studies, Mark Wolf describes LEGO as a "mediating substance through which ideas can be expressed" (xxii) in reference to the creative potential that comes from a building material that is infinitely combinable and compatible with every other element in its range. The compatibility of Bionicle elements at this early stage argues for its inclusion in this notion of a mediating substance, or, more simply, a medium.

To return to the idea of fantasy parsed mechanically, the initial mythos of Bionicle is a mystical one. Six prophesied heroes wash ashore on a mysterious island, discover a connection to elemental powers, and to a sacred mission to protect and reawaken "the Great Spirit" Mata Nui. Yet these heroes, and the villagers they protect, and even the beasts that threaten them, are mechanical in nature, not just in the elements that make up the sets, but in the narrative itself. It was this juxtaposition that I found initially so enthralling; a line of technical Lego aligned around a story of spiritual fulfillment, around the three virtues of Unity, Duty, and Destiny. In this opening phase of the tale, there was really no inkling of the post-apocalyptic undercurrent that would eventually eclipse the more spiritual side of the story. This was simply a tale of the fulfillment of a prophecy, one told using machines.

I want to hang on this for a moment. The Bionicle figures are machines, as are all of the models in the Lego Technic line. They're not even simple machines, but semi-complex combinations of axles and gears and levers and wheels. They function through rational principles that have been described through the centuries by physicists. But, at least initially, they embody qualities that fly in the face of the rational: destiny, spirituality, faith and belief. It's a rather beautiful combination, a practical application of the principles of physics and the principles of faith, combined in a toy that is, at its most basic level, an infinitely iterative device. Is this telling us something important about a combination of the rational and the irrational? Can such a combination lead to infinite novelty? In the case of Bionicle, I think the answer is yes.

To conclude with my mechanical meditation, the irony of the line is that as it progresses further and further from fantasy into the science fictional realm, the figures become less and less mechanical. Poseability and articulation are far superior in the 2009 line of figures than in this inaugural one, but the story becomes almost wholly mechanistic and rational. What is fascinating, then, is the combination of the two that emerges in the 2015 reboot (which, actually, may or may not be a reboot proper.)

Let's spend a bit of time, now, on the actual models.

Most of what you see in the above pictures are the standard models to have been released in the initial wave of Bionicle. A trend that continues until at least 2006 is the inclusion in each instruction book of alternate model sets. For the Toa, these alternate models were two beings known as the Toa Kaita, combinations of three each that amalgamated the powers and personalities of the individual heroes. These are relatively well-known combiner models, and also make brief appearances in the canonical stories surrounding this era of the series.

These kaita are, however, the only sets in the 2001 figure wave (as opposed to the creature wave) that include such combination instructions. Both the Turaga (village leaders, the figures with small staffs in the upper pictures) and the early Matoran (the "McTorans" or Tohunga) have combiner models but not published, at least in pamphlet form, instructions.

                                     The McToran combiner models (so named due to their inclusion in Happy Meals from McDonalds) are fairly simple to build, due mainly to the number and nature of parts involved. Each set is simply 7 pieces, and all are fairly large and fit together in only so many ways. Consideration of the pictures on the instructions included with each set is enough to build both versions of the Matoran Kaita and the Matoran Nui.

Instructions for the Turaga combiners require some searching. Though the picture of the Turaga Nui (pictured at right with the Bronze Huna) appears in some official LEGO publications, instructions for the model were never released. The model in the picture was constructed using fan-made instructions, and, for the completists, is also missing Nokama's noble kanohi Rau, which is replaced with a light blue Huna. This is one of the problems with collecting enough to create all of the official combiner models - early sets such as turaga Nokama become more and more difficult to come by. We'll see this again when we get to the Kirikori Nui and its make-up. The Kabaya Sweets promotional Turaga Kaita does have official instructions, packaged with the toys when they were released in Japan, one assumes. Though similar to the Turaga Nui, the Kaita is less-robust a model. Both arms on the Nui are attached to levers on the back, allowing for some stability in those limbs, whereas the Kaita's arms swing free. The Kaita is also quite difficult to balance properly. I've noted before that the aesthetic of the Japanese combiner models is somewhat different from the European or North American combiners, but this one is an exception to the rule. The Kaita really just looks like the Nui after a diet.

One last figure set deserves some attention before we finish.

The Bionicle Power Pack was an early experiment for Bionicle and LEGO in transmedial storytelling. Not only does the package include another Matoran and a mask that, ostensibly, is worn by one of the above Toa Kaita, but the CD included with the package has a map of the island on the liner notes, and includes both an interactive tour of the stone village on Mata Nui and three music tracks ostensibly composed by the Toa themselves. The interactive content, sadly, is not Windows 10 compatible, so I've been unable to install it on my system, but it can be found at the archive of the BioMedia Project here. Hafu, the Matoran who comes with this set receives an upgrade in 2003 as part of the Mask of Light tie-in Matoran, and is representative of a strange choice on LEGO's part to not release Matoran from each village in that year. But we'll look more to that when we get there.

Before we finish for today, then, here's one of the songs from that disc, the track called "The Bionicle Music." Whether this fits with the fantasy/jungle aesthetic of the early series is a good question. In some ways it enhances that strange mixture of the scientific and irrational by providing a soundtrack that one cannot imagine the inhabitants of the island of Mata Nui composing. Enjoy. Next time, we'll have a look at the Rahi of the island, the Toa's first challenge in reawakening the Great Spirit.

The Building Chronicle: A Critical Consideration of LEGO's "Bionicle" Series - Building Through part 1.1 - 2001

Thanks to the wonderful individuals over at the Facebook Bionicle Community Group, I've been inspired to take up pen (or keyboard) again on this blog and begin to really look at Bionicle. I'm also beginning to think about the series' place in my dissertation, so here I will throw out thoughts and ideas that I'm having about the series, through all its media, some of which may stick, some of which may not.

To start, then, I'm going to be building through each of the years of the Generation 1 series until it's demise in 2010. The series undergoes remarkable shifts in aesthetic and genre over the course of it's 10 year run, so there'll be plenty to talk about and think about.

In the interest of these posts not being overly long, I'll be splitting my considerations of each year into manageable parts, hence this being part "1.1."

This build through of 2001 includes both commercially available models and the officially-sanctioned/canonical combiner models published by Lego. The first thing to note is that officially-sanctioned and canonical are not necessarily the same thing. We have officially-sanctioned combiners for the Turaga, published both by Lego and by Kabaya in Japan, but the models depict characters that make no appearances in the storyline. For officially-sanctioned models, I accept models published either at the Lego website, in the Lego magazine, or by third-party distributors of Lego. The most prominent of these last is Kabaya, and I'll be sure to point out these Japanese takes on the Bionicle universe when they appear. As I noted here, the aesthetic of the Japanese models is quite different from the European and North American aesthetics, so the models are worth considering closely. Later into the build, once we reach 2006, we'll also look at a pair of Korean Piraka models, assuming I've found the pieces for them by that time! A final type of model I consider, and collect, is the contest-winner models that occurred through the line's history. These models are made canonical by their inclusion in the fictions that accompany Bionicle, and their creators have been kind enough to post instructions at various locations online.

Since this is going to be, at least partially, preparation for my dissertation, I'll also be looking at a few books as I'm building the series, and probably drawing on them for theoretical formulations. Daniel Lipkowitz's The Lego Book is a decent, and colourful, history of the company and the toy. Jonathan Bender's Lego: A Love Story is a nice piece of reflection and reportage on the phenomenon of AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego), and Mark Wolf's Lego Studies is a collection of scholarly essays about the phenomenon that is Lego. They're very different perspectives on the same toy/media, which will be fruitful in my consideration of Bionicle as a nascent fictional mythic structure.


To begin with, here's the whole of my 2001 collection, with the exception of the comics. I'll post a picture of them when I get to the inevitable extended meditation on Bionicle in sequential art.

I'll zoom into each section as we're going along, comment on the builds, the place of each character or creature in the story, and on the ancillary merchandise surrounding the series. There is one MOC in that picture. I've always been a fan of the infected Tohunga (more on that term later) version of Makuta from the original animations on the Lego site. I painted one up with the rust-looking stuff and he's sitting in the center of that picture, stroking the back of a Fikou spider. He's probably the only one of my own MOCs I'll be including here. Other peoples' MOCs, contest-winners in particular, will make appearances by virtue of them having been placed in continuity.

To finish things off with this initial post, here's a quick video of my constructing Kirikori Nui, the first official combiner of the Bionicle line, and the last model I put together yesterday in my build of 2001. I'll look more closely at this model and the Ranama, as they are combiners that utilize pieces from non-Bionicle sets, and are thus unique in the line. But we'll save that for another day.

I'm hoping to update this blog at least twice a week, perhaps Tuesdays and Thursdays, as those are the days I'm not on campus for work. I'll do my best, and even if I'm going to miss a day, I'll update to let you know that. Thanks for following along, and happy building.

Constructing a Collection - Don't Knock the Quarter Bin

(The second installment, written very close to exactly 5 years later. Next break won't be quite so long. Promise.)

Five years ago, I started what I'd hoped would be a series of articles about constructing a comic collection. Five years later, all I have is that introduction, but I still think it's a pretty interesting thing to talk about. I do love talking and thinking about collecting (as this currently-fallow blog attests), so I'm resurrecting the series. We'll start with a consideration of the quarter bin.

(I'm going to pepper this post with actual scans of things I've found in dollar bins, just to give a sense of the scope and quality of comics available in such places.)

 Probably the first question/comment would likely be "What the heck is a quarter bin?" It's a testament to the time in which I was beginning to think about these articles that I would think of the bargain bins of many comic stores as "Quarter Bins." Sadly, the days of quarter comics, except at the occasional garage sale, are over. It' much more likely you'll see a "Dollar Bin" nowadays. But if we consider that some comics hit upwards of five dollars per issue, a dollar is pretty good.

Secondly, let's expand our definition of a Quarter/Dollar bin, which will actually place the notion of a 25 cent comic back on the table. Dollar Bins don't have to be located in comic stores. A flea market might have comics kicking about on a table for anything from a quarter to a dollar. I've found packages of comics for $10, which turned out to mean 50 cents per comic. The Quarter/Dollar bin is a collecting metaphor. Really, we can consider it as any place where one can procure comics for less than they are likely to be new or as collectibles in a comic store.

As far as I've ascertained, there are four categories of comics, one of which I've not yet been fortunate enough to procure. Every so often one will hear a story, be it online or from an acquaintance, about someone who is pouring through a stack of old comics at a flea market or garage sale, and comes across something ridiculous like Action Comics #1. It may not be in pristine condition, but, really, who cares?! Imagine finding that comic, regardless of condition, and getting it for a dollar. Or less. I live in hope that one of these days something similar will happen to me, so I have that kind of story. But not yet. This is not to say, however, that the other categories of comics one can find are not every bit as fun and exciting. It's just in different ways.

The above comic is The Adventures of Mighty Mouse #132, published by Pines Comics in, according to the GCD, 1956-ish. My old copy of the Overstreet lists this issue at $65 Near Mint, and $5 Good. I got this one for 50 cents. The staples are still good, the center page is still there. It's missing a cover, but, really, the cover is simply there to, well, cover things. For readers, at least, it's what's inside that's important. My point for this comic, and similar ones in my collection, is that I likely wouldn't have paid even $5 for a copy of it. I like the mid-eighties Mighty Mouse from Marvel, but the character's not a particular favourite. This comic, however, coming in a stack of similarly aged and conditioned comics, was a wonderful find. It's utterly, utterly strange, and revealed to me that the attributes I admire in the aforementioned Marvel version of Mighty Mouse are not unique to that era of the comic. And if I'd turned my nose up at cheap, coverless comics, I'd never have discovered it. The Quarter/Dollar bin can be a treasure trove of strangeness. Weird independent comics that never got much play on the shelves, battered up copies of old comics from the fifties (a decade that really was another planet). In my delving into these troves, I'll often pick out the strangest covers I can find (I know, I know, judging books etc.). Often they'll be bad. But occasionally, they'll be good.

Comics like this one are often shunned by collectors. They're in bad condition, they don't give the full presentation of what the original material artefact was. I prefer to see these comics as being well-loved. The rounded corners, the slight oil stain at the edge of each page, the dulled almost to brown pages and equally dulled colours. They've been around, seen a lot of wear. They've been read. And really, for a narrative in any medium, to have been told and retold, or to tell and retell, I suppose, is really the highest praise it can receive.

Further up the page is the Steve Gerber-penned Cybernary #1. A good portion of Gerber's output in the nineties was with Image, and much of it suffered from the fact that he had to cleave to the shared universe within which he wrote, a universe of gravity-defying breasts and psychotic superheroes. It is no secret to anyone who's read this blog for a while that I'm a huge fan of Gerber's work. But he's not one of those writers, like Gaiman or Moore, who is voraciously, and more importantly popularly, collected and read by the general comics reading public. Gerber's writing demonstrates another of the categories of dollar bin finds. I've found many, many of his old works in such places, the one-offs he did for Creatures on the Loose for Marvel, his 4 issues of Captain America from the late seventies. They're not well-regarded comics, likely because they were fill-in issues for the regular writer/artist team, but they do have something about them that's intrinsically Gerberian (a notion I'm exploring over at Sequart). If you've a propensity for the work of someone like Doug Moench, or would love to read the old adventures of Morbius, the Living Vampire, the dollar bin is a good bet. That said, I've definitely found obscure works by the likes of Moore and Gaiman in dollar bins. The popularity of a writer/artist/title is no guarantee of high cost for all of the associated works. If you're clamouring to read all of Neil Gaiman's comics output, have a look in your local dollar bin for Elric #0 from Topps, beautifully illustrated by P. Craig Russell. Or Moore's old Time Twisters from 2000 A.D. in Quality's Time Twisters series. The dollar bin is a wonderful place to find oddities that fit your collection that, in some cases, you never even knew existed.

"Those three types of comics are all well and good, Tom" I hear you say, "but what about new stuff?" Well, you're in luck, but only in a few places. The coverless old stuff, the quirky collection stuff, they're staples of the dollar bin. The rare find is just that, rare. The fourth category I've discovered isn't ubiquitous, and often only happens in comic stores that are quite small. My local store in Calgary (Phoenix Comics N.W.) has very limited space, and no back issue boxes, so when comics get too old and don't sell, they're relegated to the dollar bin. To the right is issue #3 of Dark Engine, publication date October 2014. So the comic's just slightly more than 8 months old. I found the first three issues of this series in Phoenix's dollar bin, and picked them up because, well, a dollar! And it turns out to be a really great and intriguing series, which, again, I very likely would not have picked up for the cover price. That said, I'm going to keep reading the series, and pay full price for subsequent issues. This particular use of the dollar bin is quite wonderful, I think. I get to try a new comic for a substantial discount, and the store stands a chance of creating a new reader who will then pay full price for the rest of the series. Phoenix Comics has been remarkable for this sort of find for me. A number of the series I am currently reading I initially found in that dollar bin, and I'm so grateful for the opportunity to try new series without too much of an "am I wasting my money?" feeling.

(I probably shouldn't have mentioned where I got those new issues. All you Calgarian readers are going to go and scoop up all the good stuff now!)

I'll never stop shopping in the dollar bin. At the moment it's a nice way to grab a pile of comics and stay within a graduate student budget, but even when I start making actual money (that does happen, right?), I keep going to the dollar bin. For me, it is the place where the real wonder and fun of collecting comics is crystalised. There is the thrill of finding something cool and unique, of discovering the new or re-discovering the old. The smell of old newsprint wafts from them, the dust of years accumulates on your fingers as you search, your heart leaps when you think you've found something great. Were I ever to counsel someone on starting to build their own comics collection, I would say this: Take $50, go to a comic shop that has a substantial dollar bin, and get 50 comics. Base your purchase on how the comic looks, the characters on the cover, the genre it seems to be. You'll find great things and terrible things. And it will be one of the best $50 you spend in your life.

Constructing a Collection - Introduction

(I originally posted this to my comics blog five years ago. Even at that early point in my education, I knew there was something interesting about collecting and collections. The next installment of this was written in the last few weeks. I think this intro still stands up, so I've left it as is.)

I've not been writing editorially on this blog for a while now, so I thought it was time to get back to it. Almost 10 years ago, I opened up a used book and comic store. It survived from October of 2001 to August of 2002, not quite a year, and was one of the best things I've ever done. I won't pretend that it was perfect. Running a business never is as far as I can tell. But for 11 months I had a comic store. Fantastic.

Anyway, 10 years later, I'm in the process of cataloguing what remains of the inventory of my store. The comics are all I have left from it, having donated or sold just about everything else. And when it came time to decide what to do with them, I just could not part with them. So, a while back, I started going through them, sorting out all the duplicates, cross-referencing with my personal collection, and entering the remaining comics into my database. I'm currently on the letter M, so halfway through, and I realized that it's a pretty great collection. As I go through it, I come across little gems that I had no idea were in there, occasional autographed comics (including a Neil Gaiman autograph, which is really cool!), some rather valuable ones. And some that are worth just about nothing, but are fantastic comics anyway.

It occurred to me that I was pretty lucky, as a comic book fan, to have access to this kind of collection. And as I've been going through it, various things about the accumulation of such a collection have been presenting themselves. Because although the vast majority of the collection came from my store, it's also partially come from 25 years of collecting comics. And you learn one or two things in that time. Over the next couple of months I'll be writing short pieces on these one or two things, both as a chronicle of my own collection, and as my suggestions for creating a collection.

The Building Chronicle: A Critical Consideration of LEGO's "Bionicle" Series - An Exercise in Limitation

            One of the problems that a collector can run into, especially if he or she is an avid and occasionally indiscriminate collector, is to be spoilt for choice.  I run into this problem often with my comics, in trying to decide exactly what to read because there is so much to choose from.  While in some ways this is a ridiculous complaint from a stance of materialistic privilege, if we look at it from within the psyche/frame of reference of the collector, it can be a problem.  Is this the point at which one must ask if the collection has gotten out of hand?

            One of the uses to which I put the Bionicle collection is a sort of Zen practice.  I’ve become so accustomed to the ways the pieces fit together, the models that they are designed to make, that I can find some peaceful moments amidst the constant stress of graduate school.  I have my collection broken up into two subsets: the first is the models proper, each as complete as I can manage (after 14 years of them being moved around, built and rebuilt, and played with both by myself and an occasionally sticky-fingered son!), and separated into their own ziplock bags.  The other subset is all of the duplicate pieces, those I haven’t co-opted to try to make promotional models or models I don’t own yet.  The building subset.  However, when I sit down to build, I am often overwhelmed by the variety with which I’m beset.  Further to this, I also find I’m often limited in my building by thinking about how the pieces fit into the models proper.  These are two difficult restrictions from which to break.

            My topic today, then, is an exercise in limitation, though I had thought about calling it “(l)imitation,” actually.  Taking my cue from some Japanese Bionicle instructions I found online (http://www.bzpower.com/story.php?ID=2184), I built a number of mech-like models from a very specific subset of pieces.  These alternate Japanese models were included with bundled packs of the Rahkshi, and use pieces from four of the Rahkshi (green and white, red and brown) to build a couple of cool models.  

 Aside from their overall aesthetic being quite different from the combiner models one sees in the North American Lego magazine, the ways that the pieces are either utilized or joined together is somewhat different as well.  Hence, in my own buildings, the idea of imitation.  I decided that I would build ostensibly with the differing aesthetic in mind, and also with the differing ways of joining the pieces.  To add to this, I also limited myself to parts from two models, and two models only (with a bit of a cheat later on!).

            For my first experiment, I procured from my spare parts all the pieces of the two Rahkshi that were not included in the Japanese instruction, the black and blue models.  I started in with the idea of building something mech-like (I’ve been reading a lot of the old Robotech comics lately, so that may have had something to do with it too), and also attempted to break from my set notions of how pieces can go together.  The model is a bit shaky in places, allowing for the ways that the pieces are joined, but I think it turned out pretty good.

            My next attempt took some of the oldest pieces, and ones that I’ve traditionally had a fair bit of difficulty creating anything new from.  This model was made from the Nuva versions of Lewa and Pohatu (green and brown).  The parts are very specific to the models they are designed for, which has always been my trouble in making new models.  However, with the notion of a mech in mind once again, and also of thinking outside of my constructive comfort zone, I managed to put together something that I think looks pretty good.  I haven’t yet tried this experiment with one of the newer models, and I wonder how it would go.  One of the criticisms I had with the newer lines (after about 2006 or so) was that they were little more than action figures that needed to be put together, as opposed to construction toys.  It’s a subtle difference, but a vital one, I think.

            The next model came from the first of the Metru Nui storyline releases, circa 2004.  Taking the parts from Toas Nuju and Matau, I went in with the same mind set.  These pieces are quite different, as the model attests.  I’ve constructed the combiner models that are included in the instructions for these Toa, which may have had some influence on my creative process, but the model came out more like a creature than a mech, though really everything one builds with Bionicle has that mechanical feel.  I’m still happy with it, and it still fulfills my desire to break with traditional aesthetic and construction modes, but it’s not quite the same as the other models.

            Having done this, I went back to the Toa Nuva mech I had made and attempted the same build with the pieces from the other Toa Nuva.  I was short some pieces, so I had to substitute some bits.  These builds also break slightly from my experiment’s parameters in that rather than only using parts from the two sets involved, I used parts that were included instead in my original model.  I’m not sure if it was simply the lack of novelty, but I’m not as happy with these models as with the original.

            It has been a good process to put myself through.  The build-times for each model were quite a bit longer than I usually take, as I would attempt something and it would either not work or look too traditional.  I think this is maybe the lesson, as a collector, that I can take from my exercise.  The limitations, or the demarcations, of a collection are not necessarily the limitations or demarcations one must adhere to in interacting with a collection.  I’m not sure how this can translate to another format of collection.  How, for example, can I apply this sort of exercise to my comic collection?  Perhaps in deciding that, for the space of a few weeks, I will only read Westerns, or Heavy Metal magazines?  That doesn’t sound so back (though I’m really not a fan of the Western comics genre).

            My next project for Bionicle, I think, will be to build a menagerie of creatures and take photos of them in natural settings.  I’m interested in the effect of the juxtaposition of bio-technical animals in an organic setting.  What kinds of questions or confluences will this ask of the creature or the setting, and what kind of (potentially) artistic statement will it make?

            Hopefully that little experiment will be up in a much shorter stretch of time.

The Building Chronicle: A Critical Consideration of LEGO's "Bionicle" Series - Picture #1: Ultimate Dume

I tend to go through and build my Bionicles when I am stressed and need a way of relaxing.  Reliving the story and following the instructions of the sets provides this kind of relaxation.  As I finish a year's worth of the series, I display them for a while, then dismantle them and move on to the next year.  Unfortunately, when I decided to start writing this series of articles, I had already dismantled the 2001 - 2004 series.  The following is the last of the 2004 models I dismantled.  From Brickipedia:

"10202 Ultimate Dume is a BIONICLE combiner model that was released in 2004. The set includes 555 pieces, 8621 Turaga Dume and Nivawk, 8622 Nidhiki and 8623 Krekka, which can be combined to create "Ultimate Dume"." ("Ultimate Dume")

Picture courtesy of author.

The Ultimate Dume model is based on the final villain of the second major Bionicle storyline, set in the city of Metru Nui.  As a combiner model, he incorporates elements of three previously-released sets, and this combination is based on the climax of the second Bionicle film, in which the Makuta absorbs the main antagonists of the story into his own body and creates a new one to battle the Toa Metru.

(All of this will be far more clear as the articles progress and I elucidate the story!)

 Works Cited

"10202 Ultimate Dume." Brickipedia. Wikia. n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2014.