Okay, ONE girl has a full set of armor. FINE.

irst things first: Thank you all so much for your kind words in regards to Thunder last week. It meant a lot to Dee and myself, and we truly appreciate it.

I hope you all like the new AMPUTHEATRE website. I'm actually making myself smaller scale figures and boards, so I can host games for the kind and wonderful folks who have bought my figures on Etsy and want nothing more than to have them kill people. This has been a fun project: I love my new Hagfish and Zwanziger (oops, he has no page yet; best get to work on that, Gil) and I also got to recycle the first-ever Olympus figure that I built, whose musculature and frame were certainly not to the size that my larger scale figures needed.

Two new figures in the store this week that I want to talk about...

This is a Gallows Wraith. It's the undead spirit of a hanged innocent. Demons en route to the triple tree at midnight (expecting to take a murderer to Hell) will steal the pure soul for themselves and remain on Earth. The catch is that they leave their wings behind. The Gallows Wraith takes both the wings and the rope, and exacts vengeance on all life for cheating it of his.

I design these types of monsters as little generic beasts to spice up your role-playing campaigns. Let's see... give him 9 hit dice, Armor Class 3, and either two attacks via claw, or a strangling attack. Warp those stats to the game of your choice.

I was inspired by a Bal-Sagoth song which included in its lyrics a winged Arch-Wraith, but I toyed with this type of monster for years. In my first design it didn't have wings; rather it floated by means of holding its own noose, still fastened about its neck. Nightmarish. Then the somewhat embarrassing demises of many a cool celebrity from auto-erotic asphyxiation over the years would have lent the beast to some annoying jokes. "Look out! It's a zombie David Carradine!" "...No, it's Michael Hutchence; he's singing 'Never Tear Us Apart'! Quick, let's obliterate/This twist of fate/Asphyxiate/It's not too late!"

Meanwhile in the AMPUTHEATRE store, Mandibula returns, but this figure's got a twist...

That's right: Topless Mandibula! Need I remind you that she's a succubus, and this is not out-of-character for her to wear.)

I suppose I should have marked this figure of deviantART and Etsy as "Mature". I really don't see why. For one thing, "Chenille Macabre" and "AMPUTHEATRE" are what they are- you know you're getting into mischief with names like those. Second, my art often contains skinless beasts, ripped-open corpses, and blood-stained weapons of death. But somehow those aren't as shocking as two blue mounds each topped with a pink dot...? I don't think so.

...That's right, SoulCalibur- you may have made millions of dollars making the same game over and over again, and your characters are known the world over. But I know damn well that it claws at your anime-rated-T-for-Teen-BDSM-guts that AMPUTHEATRE can show titty and you can't.

No matter how. Hard. You. TRY.