The Invisible Man. Visibly Cool.

Moebius Models has made some of the coolest figure models on the planet.

None cooler than their Invisible Man.  

Figure models are rare and a lot of the ones that are out there are...mediocre.

I own most of the kits that model superheroes and generally have little interest in any of the other figure model kits I've seen.  The Invisible Man is the one exception to that.

The figure is impressively posed, ripping his bandages off to reveal his secret.  The kit builders achieved this by simply making his head hollow with enough holes to show the empty space beneath the bandages.  I chose to put him in a simple black suit with a white lab coat, but there are builds out there with him in a pinstripe suit, one very impressive tartan build and even entirely black and white builds that pay homage to the 1940's movie directly.  It's one of those kits that really lets the builder use their imagination to make the build unique.

 

If you can, zoom in.

 

Bottles, books, and a translucent rat. Oh and the Invisible Man!

This is one of the most complex, detailed kits I've ever seen.  There are a dozen or so glass (clear plastic, two halves glued together) bottles and jars, a couple dozen books, a chemical apparatus (really, really fiddly to put together) and almost no set places for any of it.  Usually there are holes for pegs for each part, but with only a couple of exceptions, the layout is left to the builder.  Even the placement of the figure, the table and the bookshelf are entirely left to the discretion of the builder.

I started the build years ago.  Seriously.

I had seen versions of this where the clear glass bottles appeared to be filled with actual liquid and decided I could make that happen.  Turns out, putting liquid inside tiny plastic bottles that are two halves that need to then be glued together is more difficult than you might imagine.  The liquid tends to find the seam between the halves while the glue is still wet and by capillary action the liquid inside the bottle gets pulled into those seams.  At that point, the glue often fails.

I was able to make one test work and then watch dozens of attempts fail.  I put the whole kit aside and kept looking at it in its corner, thinking I'd get to it one day.

This week was that day.  

I found a half decent way to make the bottles look like they were full of liquid, then fussed and finessed everything into place, built the whole kit and even filled the chemical apparatus with real salt to give it a different look than the rest of the bottles and jars.  With a lot of patience, I got all the book spine decals in place as well.  Those spine decals didn't come with the kit, but it turns out there's a nifty custom decal set out there for this model - apparently I'm not the only fussy builder who knows there's no way they could paint book spines that would satisfy their critical eye. 

I think it came out just wonderfully.  I wish I'd had the presence of mind to take pix as I went, but this one was an exercise in multi-tasking, with a lot of "okay, while that's drying, I'll do...x...and then by then I can assemble...y..." so there just never seemed to be a free moment for photos.

You'll just have to enjoy the two pix above.  Zoom in if you can.  There's some incredible detail in the background on that table and bookshelf.  I chose to have some bottles lying down, I used Testor's clear parts glue with food colouring in it to fill jars with "liquid" and even painted the "carpet" in GB-esque purple and green.

This one was a LOT of work and I think it was worth it...eventually.