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"Marley was dead... to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that."
Once a proud soldier in the Order of Eathyron, Hagnon led a legendary campaign that led to one of the Congregation of Necronominus' greatest defeats. Later hunted and captured by the treacherous Brother Mandibulus, he was brought to the unforgiving Morgolyth
for his final reckoning. In a chilling act of revenge, Morgolyth ended Hagnon's life and resurrected him as one of her own. Eternally chained and shackled for his crimes, he has become the menacing and forever-conflicted ghostly agent of Necronominus.
The actual opening line of A Christmas Carol reads "Marley was dead: to begin with," using a colon that seems remarkably oddly placed to modern readers. But Dickens wasn't using it the way we do nearly 200 years later - the introduction of an explanation or list - but rather as a piece of rhetorical punctuation: a way to control the reader's pace. Or more specifically, the orator's pace; Dickens wrote with the knowledge that his stories would be read aloud to gathered listeners, and thus used punctuation to direct the tempo like a piece of sheet music; in short, if a comma was a "one pause," a semicolon was a "two" pause, a period was a "three," and this colon was meant to be a "four." That's why we changed it to an elipsis up above: it better conveys his intent when you're reading it today. "Marley was dead--" (pause pause pause pause) "--to begin with."
Hagnon the ghost certainly has
a spooky construction. For the most part, it's the same as Series 1's Tibius - the male chest, skeletal arms and legs, etc. Whenever possible, he's been given the plate armor pieces, which are the "normal" ones with all the little X's carved in as design work. He's even got the same collar scoop. The faluds are different, because he's actually got some hanging from his belt rather than just two loops for his swords. This design fully suits the story of a knight who became a ghost.
The head is terrific! Although the foggy plastic makes it hard to see, he's got a very "Mike Mignola" face, with large round eyes, big jug ears, and extremely sunken cheeks. Give him a skintone, and he'd be able to hang out with Lobster Johnson. It's a very suitable for a ghost, looking ancient but not decayed. His eyes get the only paint to be found on the figure: solid white.
When the Kickstarter reached $705,000, Hagnon received two additional heads: a knight's helmet and the skull with the articulated jaw. Those are nice inclusions, because it lets you display Hagnon in every stage of his undeath, from "newly murdered and wearing his armor" to "accepting of his fate" (similar to Kingdom Come Deadman). The heads swap easily, of course, and the neck matches the skeletal limbs.
Hagnon's accessories include the orc sword and
the wooden shield, which do get paint apps, and the small pauldrons, which do not. Even the wing-adapter backpack thingies are bare plastic this time! Why? Because Hagnon is a ghost, and so he glows in the dark! The body, the armor, everything but the weapons glows. To show how he's trapped in servitude, the figure comes with some new chains: a set of manacles to link his wrists, and a ball and chain to clamp around his neck. The actual cuffs have thin breaks in them, rather than being solid - it's a strange choice, since the Mythic Legions' modular construction means you can pull the body apart to put the chains on, so the gaps aren't needed. And their existence is made worse by the bands being slightly too small to fit comfortably around the toy's extremities, meaning the simple act of wearing them opens them up.
When the Four Horsemen were finalizing this figure, they had to decide what color glow he should have: the greenish tint
we get here, or one that's more of a blue. They asked their factory about the feasibility of having half the run glow blue, and half the run glow green; the sample the factory sent after that conversation displayed a little... confusion. Something got lost in translation, and they'd made a figure that was literally half green and half blue. Which, yes, looked cool in its own way, but wasn't exactly what the Horsemen were after. (And proving that it wasn't just a question of language barriers, when the 4H showed off this funny error in a project update, backers in the comments started complaining about how they wanted "the white one, not a variant." Reading comprehension, you utter boneheads!) Unable to find a mixture that worked for the blue, they opted to skip it for the time being rather than hold up production. Honestly, that's fine, because blue is a little too "Force ghost" for our liking.
Hagnon's manacles should be a skosh larger, so they don't flex open when he's wearing them, but getting a shackled ghost is a very cool toy.
-- 10/12/19
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