Ryan

Say, you look familiar. Chapter 6 of the Zombie Lab story is back to being utterly vague about who anyone is doing - there's a plot, and a timestamp that says it's only been two hours since the zombies broke out of Lab 51, but not a single named character to be found anywhere, just random humans. So choose your own adventure! Is Ryan: A) boarding up the stairs and elevator on his floor, B) fortifying his own apartment, C) relocating to a different floor with other survivors, or D) trapped alone below the 40th floor? You make the call! And while we're at it, is "Ryan" A) his first name or 2) his last name? You also make that call as well, too! Ryan is dressed semi-casually, but also way more formally than you'd expect from someone in their own home. I don't know about you, but when I leave the OAFE offices (or "OAFEfices") at the end of the day and return to my stately country manor (where, no matter what some gossips have claimed, Batman and I have totally been seen at the same time, you just weren't there right then), the first thing I do is take off my shoes. I don't hang out at home wearing brown pants (rip in the leg or no), a vest, and a button-up shirt. Even with the sleeves rolled up, that's not at all comfortable. Sure, Ryan, you've got to be on the defensive when your building is swarmed by the undead, but if you never relax, is your life even worth living? No, no it is not. Sculpt us some characters wearing their comfies, toy companies! So Ryan is... there's no way around this, Ryan is Steven Yeun. Glenn from The Walking Dead. It's possible the similarity is unintentional, but in a zombie-themed property, parallels are going to be made. He may not be wearing a baseball cap, but that was more of a comic thing than a TV thing anyway, so we can let it go. Steven Glenn Ryan was created by Boss Fight Studio for Locker Toys Group, using the Boss Fight Vitruvian HACKS style, so the articulation is just as impressive as the sculpt is. He can run away from Negan with a balljointed head and neck; swivel/hinge shoulders, elbows and wrists; a balljointed torso; balljointed hips; double-hinged knees; and swivel/hinge ankles. Everything was working fine straight out of the box, too: nothing too stiff, nothing too loose, nothing broken or stuck... a good range of motion for him! Locker Toys could have really leaned into the "Glenn" of it all by giving this toy the baseball bat accessory, but they didn't. Instead, we get a golf club and a fancy modern hatchet - both things we've seen with other figures, but make sense as "things one might find within a civilian apartment to use as a weapon." There's also the normal display stand, and an art card that shows Ryan in a public restroom(?), dual-wielding his hatchet and a knife and generally looking like a badass who's ready to slice up some undead suckas! And of course, Zombie Lab Chapter 6 is printed on the back. Now that I know we could have been getting unlicensed celebrity lookalikes in this line, I wish we'd been seeing them all along! Every wave of this series should have had some "wink wink nudge nudge" character. Simon Pegg, Emma Stone, Brad Pitt, Milla Jovovich, anybody who's famous and been in a zombie movie. The likenesses on 4" figures are so iffy that you could easily plead innocence, if anybody tried to get mad at a minor Kickstarted toyline that was just including them as Easter eggs and not using their names to sell. -- 07/26/19

Tweet