How playing with action figures became a brand new art form.
How Articulated Comic Book Art quickly went from niche hobby to respectable craft
Christian Baluyot super glued an action figure to his middle finger. “I was so scared,” he says. “I stared at it for a while.”
Baluyot thought he might have to go to the hospital to have doctors yank it off. He could bring his fouryear-old son, Christopher, and hide some shame by saying it was a result of their shenanigans.
The truth of the matter was a bit different. Baluyot was assembling the pieces of a nearly completed custom action figure of X-Men villain Magneto when super glue gushed from the seams of the cape and within seconds, the toy was stuck to his finger.
Yes, Baluyot, a 29 year old from Toronto, plays with action figures. But it’s not all fun and games. He takes his craft seriously, plastic stuck to a digit was just one more obstacle to overcome on his road to becoming the Articulated Comic Book Art world champion of 2014.
Articulated Comic Book Art, or ACBA, uses action figures, handsculpted dioramas, professional lighting, speech bubbles, and visual effects that would fool anyone into believing they’re looking at a page from a comic book or a screenshot from a film. ACBA is mostly done through photography, but artists looking to be crowned the world champion have to capture it on video during a monthslong competition.
ACBA artists don’t work on their displays, they “grind.” Hours are spent setting up one display, stretching toy articulation to its limit, moving lights by sheer degrees and repainting dioramas because of a single blemish. Hundreds of photos and more than a handful of takes are captured in search of perfection. When no amount of tinkering can satisfy them, ACBA artists scrap displays — even after spending hours on them.
Spread out between the months of August and October, more than a hundred artists are given an entire month between rounds to set up dis- plays accompanying a single theme. Participants are scored on their performance in five categories — posing, effects, props and backdrop, concept and creativity, and for the use of comic book cutouts.
In 2014, only 25 of the 129 artists made it out of the first round. Ten artists competed in the finals.
A relative newcomer to the art form, Baluyot took a week off work to complete his first-round display. “At one point I was sleeping beside the display I was working on,” Baluyot says. “I would sit by my display for five hours and every now and then, I would make small tweaks. My girlfriend would laugh at me.”
When she wasn’t giggling at him, Keithlyn Bacani, was helping him win the tournament. Bacani has an architecture background and built all the buildings and dioramas seen in Baluyot’s entries.
After coming in third place in the first round, Baluyot would win the second round with a display featuring the action figure he super glued to his finger. His third round display was set in the Avengers mansion, with more than 20 Ultron robots swarming to defeat Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, and the Hulk.
At one point I was sleeping beside the display I was working on
Kendel Gray, one of the creators of ACBA and tournament judge, says he likes to keep it professional when he’s grading the tournament entries, but when the 34 year old from New York saw Baluyot’s entries, he couldn’t contain himself.
“I can remember last year (telling the other judges) ‘Yo, did you see that s---?,’” Gray, with a noticeable New York accent, says of Baluyot’s first round entry. “We gotta be professional but yo, that s--- was ill!”
Gray says ACBA spawned from a group of 25 Youtubers who collected Marvel Legends — a Hasbro toy line of action figures based on Marvel comics and film characters — posting reviews and videos showing off the hundreds of toys in their collections. The first world tournament was held in 2011 with only a handful of competitors. It has since evolved to include more than double the contestants, prizes and raffles at the end of each round and sponsorship from major online toy retailers and toy companies.
Feeling he’s become successful in turning ACBA into an art form, Gray has since focused on turning it into a profitable business. But having grown up in Harlem, N.Y., Gray’s one experience with running a business was as a drug dealer in his younger days.
“I played the streets for a long time,” Gray says. “The old me would be grateful I got my s--- together. There’s only really two ways to end up when you doing negative s--- like that: You gonna end up incarcerated or dead.”
Gray says he’s applying the hard lessons he learned on the streets to making ACBA profitable today. “It’s a hustler’s mentality,” Gray said. “Whatever tactics you can apply to a street busi- ness, those same tactics can be applied to legitimate business. If you got book smarts, street smarts... and the gift of gab, you unstoppable in business.”
Gray has taken advantage of what he says is the inability of larger companies like Hasbro to provide collectors with everything they’d like to properly display action figures. When Hasbro doesn’t package many of its Spider-Man toys with webbing, ACBA sells custom-made ones. When toy companies don’t include stands for flying characters to be posed in the air, ACBA sells custom-made ones. Gray and his team are even selling packs of comic-book cutouts and T-shirts.
Under Gray and what he calls the ACBA community, business continues to expand. The first ACBA art show was held at Vinylsaurus Arteologists in La Puenta, Calif. ACBA has also ventured into toy production, helping the Fwoosh, a toy news and review website, and Gentle Giant Studios crush a Kickstarter goal of $160,000 by raising $343,894 to begin creating Articulated Icons: The Feudal Series, a line of thirdparty ninja action figures.
Gray says there are thousands of ACBA artists and fans around the world — from Australia, the Philippines, the U.K., Mexico, Singapore — and that’s proven by the 6,907 members in a Facebook group where artists post their work and by the 11,267 people that like the Facebook fan page — not to mention the thousands of YouTube subscribers.
That’s how Mike Wang, another Toronto-based ACBA artist, was introduced to the art form. Wang began watching videos on YouTube before finally deciding to try it out for himself. He met Baluyot at a convention and the two bonded over their shared hobby. Wang also played a role in his friend’s world tournament win, lending him some of the props seen in his entries.
Wang is entering the world tournament for the first time this year, but will have to compete against Baluyot and 109 other artists if he expects to win the trophy. Both have already begun work on their displays for the first round “Fright Night” theme. Wang hangs out in Baluyot’s apartment frequently, but avoids looking at the diorama setup up on an office desk. He won’t speak about his idea either.
Even though Baluyot is quiet about his aspirations to repeat his title win, his new friend isn’t subtle about his objective: “I want to destroy everyone. I hate losing. My girlfriend says I’m super competitive. Even with small things like when she says: ‘I’ll race you to the car.’ I’ ll sprint the whole way there.”
While the sudden rise of ACBA as an art form may make it seem like a sprint, with the ever increasing scope of works by artists like Baluyot and Wang, combined with the business hustle of Gray, we may be seeing their works of art for a long time to come.
Yo, did you see that s---? We gotta be professional but yo, that s--- was ill