The G.I.Joe ARAH CUSTOM ultimate guide book idea

So i have been thinking of this idea for awhile now and want to lay it out there for you fellow ARAH custom fans. I am sure alot of us own and look at frequently The 1st and 2nd additions of MArk Bellomos Ultimate guide to g.i.joe 1982-1994. I know for myself this book is extremely useful when i need to know whos weapons whos and it also helps when i need to know what body part would go together to make my customs. Anyway with that aside i thought it would be great to have a ultimate guide to ARAH customs. just like in the other books there can be photos, biographies, parts list, and there could even be a section for diorama playsets, vehicles and action shots.
Most of us on here wether we are good at it or not love customizing and seeing others ideas. Imagine a book that has hundreds of pictures, interesting and new biographies of caracters new or old and fellow customizers could show off there work.
Now i understand there are way to many ARAH customs out there to do all of them but maybe if somehow you could make it so only the great ones and unusual ones get put in first. MAybe have a vote on characters. I dont know that would come later after the initial idea was esstablished. BUt customizers who make it in the book could be credited either by there name online or real name. MAybe this then would show others who have not collected g.i.joe or only playd with them as a kid to get back into collecting and build the fanbase.
I just think it would be great to have one source that people like us to go to and see all of our great works. And just think if the idea was a sucess maybe more editions could be sold.
So i found Mark Bellomos email address and sent him a email in reguards to this idea. I will let you know what he says in return if he ever does. HE is actually a easy person to find contact info on.
Until then though tell me your thoughts on this fellow ARAH fans.

Could be fun, useful and inspirational. I'd also include some step-by-step tutorials for both figures and vehicles. You know, the basic things and some advanced techniques. Just like some of the Painting Guides from Warhammer that exist.

It is a terrific idea.

Tim 121RVC wrote:

Could be fun, useful and inspirational. I'd also include some step-by-step tutorials for both figures and vehicles. You know, the basic things and some advanced techniques. Just like some of the Painting Guides from Warhammer that exist.

What he said

I think that's a great idea, too.

The pessimistic side of me wonders if you'll run into problems with customizers allowing their work to be published in a book in which someone else will get the profit. In addition, I can anticipate some public backlash/whining in terms of who was decided to be included.

This may be something better suited for on-line...especially using hypertext. If you like the picture, you can click on it to find the creator's name (which would reveal a short bio, contact info, available for commissions? and a list of other customs on the site), recipe (which will have hyperlinks connecting the pieces used to a picture of the original figure it came with), other customized versions of that character, etc.

Members can "Like" a figure similar to Facebook, allowing the truly outstanding and unusual customs to stand out.

On-line will also allow you to host youtube instructional videos for "How-To's"

You can even team up with OSC's O-ring custom contest to get some themed figures.

Then, maybe after a year or so, when you've got a back catalog of some thousands of figures as well as generated some good will with customizers, you can pick the "best of the Best" (as picked up the members' "Like" votes and publish a hardcopy of that as a book.

Book or online, though, I would be interested....

I am not sure how this would work at all.

What defines a custom?

I certainly wouldn't want a book filled with pictures of customs that have horrible paint apps, terrible sanding issues, or no real thought to the bio of the character.

Let's face it, if I wanted to see examples of sharpie or marker 'painting' or little effort customs, I have the internet for that. I can pretty much google it right now.

Plus there are sites that are devoted to customs that have really good ones.

But, if the book was just about highly detailed and the best executed customs, what gets included? What scale? Would it just be GIJOE, GIJOE using Star Wars figures, GIJOE using Marvel figures, etc?

I'm not into the zombie themed or these alternate sci-fi/fantasy type customs that some make. I'm not saying they aren't great concepts, just that's not what I like.

For me I like Drednoks, Oktober Guard, and original 13 type customs.

I think that simply bookmarking your favorite customs or keeping the links to where you've seen the customs, or writing down in a notebook what a recipe is would be more efficient.

That's what I do when I ask for the recipe of something I like.

We have been talking about doing something like this for a long while. I would really like to see a monthly magazine that came out just about the custom hobby in this scale.

We are working on what our mag will be, but with all things it takes time. I really want to see this in book form tho, to be a able to pull it off a shelf and sit down with my sons or some young customizers and just create based on what is published, would be awesome.

Customizing has kinda been what ever you felt like doing, I would like to think its an art form, and one that cant be rushed. It has all its own steps, and when you rush these steps, the custom suffers and so does your creative will.

One thing I love about the net is JoeCustoms, its got more customs posted then any other site. Sure all sites have a gallery, but they worked really hard over the years, packing there's full of awesome. What I hope to achieve over the next few years is to keep all that hard work done by JC and many other custom boards around and kicking, any means we have to do it, we will