You know what one of my favorite things ever is? Meeting dudes who seem like super-scary, over-the-top, uber-intimidating icons of violence and blood-curdling menace and having them turn out to be total sweethearts. Yes, I’m looking at you John Prolly. Yes, I’m looking at you, Mine Friend the Burglar. And yes, I’m especially looking at you, Mike Sutfin.

Mike is no stranger to The Bloglin. I’ve rattled on and on about him here before…most notably for the awesome handpainted and FHP Bop Dragons he released a year or so ago. He was also the clearcut standout at the The Beast Within gallery show that was mentioned here a few years ago. Blogball/Hatelin aside, Mike has created artwork for a good amount of music over the years; music that you may have heard of/come to enjoy: 9 Shocks Terror, Capitalist Casualties, Lamb of God, Pinback, Punch in the Face, etc. (And: not to mention playing guitar in Charles Bronson and drums in the Killers [No, not THAT Killers]…both of which he contributed artwork to, too.).

(Note: If you decide to stop now because you cannot suffer a punctuation addict like myself, you will regret it. Power through. Work THROUGH the fear. Rough Draft For Life.)

So yeah. He’s back, and it’s total hardcore brutality! And to tie this slightly-further-down-the-page sentence in with that stuff at the beginning: he’s the most radical dude on the planet. Like homecoming King at the School of Hard Knocks nice. Success, fame, fortune, and happiness couldn’t happen to a cooler dude.

What’s he back with, you ask? Mike and the fine fellas at Reckless Toys debuted the images and actual sculpt for his upcoming toy—Mad Battle Man—at Comicon last year. Needless to say (but I’m gonna say it): the crowd went wild. The drawings and cast model for the toy were beyond belief: so complicated. So vile. So totally and amazingly intricate. So Sutfin.

Well, now that this year’s Comicon looms o’er the hill like a glassy-eyed blood moon, new photos of the MBM prototype have surfaced…photos of the thing in real, big-as-life, vinyl.

I’m speechless. Seriously: I’m such a Sutfan at heart that I’d like pretty much anything the guy did, but this is just too much. I don’t know if I expected details to fall out in the vinyl mold-making process or what, but from what I can see from Kirkland at TBS‘ photos, it’s picture-perfect. Amazing. The pullquote:

HIS FUCKING BRAIN IS HANGING OUT OF THE BACK OF HIS HEAD.

Both Joe at Kaiju Kronicle and Kirkland at Toybot Studios have great writeups of the toy, so I won’t rehash it, but I will share some other rare Sutfonian goodies with you.

Here is some artwork that Mike did when he was playing drums for the Killers’ (“I was thinking that you could write some kind of joke about how I played drums in the Killers before the Killers were the Killers. Ha!”). Also some tasty Cattle Decapitation Goodness. Yum.

The first colorway of the Mike Sutfin MxBxM will be available at Comicon at an as-yet-undisclosed location. Keep an eye on Joe’s Kaiju Chronicle for the head’s up, or follow Mike’s awesome radsploits at his blog, Battle On!

Pretty sure another dude we know—can’t remember his name…Love Maximum? Lust Great?—is doing some stuff with Reckless too. And damn if he isn’t in the overall Pantheon of nice, too. Heck: I wonder what the actual cross-corrollary index is for nice guys who are into Madballs AND New Era caps worldwide? Or do they all just hang out here? (Doing all I can to not make a Tobias/Never-Nude joke…more than you’ll never know.)

- Hateball