[Monte Williams]

Nearly a year ago, I purchased my first Operation: Monster Force figure, The Crimson Moon Sleepwalker:

(That backpack! So good!)

While I admired all three heads that were included with the figure, I have neither the disposable income nor the proclivity for amassing a bunch of troops, so instead I turn any given Joe, Valaverse, or Monster Force trooper I buy into an original character. Accordingly, I tried several heads on the Sleepwalker, one of the more striking being this Mezco One:12 Collective Freddy Krueger:

But I ultimately went with this Mythic Legions skull, on which I'd placed a string-of-skulls necklace from some old Figuarts Japanese demon:

I call him Doctor Ocular. What follows is a short introductory bio. I will code it and all other bios and dialogue exchanges in red, in case you prefer to skip the headcanon in favor of just studying the photos.

Doctor Ockmiller was a respected German optometrist who lived a more or less happy life until the night he witnessed Doctor Caligari's agents torturing a seemingly innocent man in a city alleyway and wisely opted not to intervene.

A Rachedämon observed Ockmiller's reaction to the incident and viewed it as cowardice. Of all his kind, this particular vengeance demon was perhaps the least inclined to show mercy, or even a sense of perspective or proportionality; he cursed Ockmiller to spend the rest of his days as Wer Verflucht Ist, Zu Sehen; He Who Is Cursed To See.

Rechristened Doctor Ocular, he can no longer gaze upon any persons without seeing the worst atrocities they ever committed. His enchanted pistol, The Serpent's Kiss, passes judgment.

That giant brain monstrosity is a Halloween mask. Here's another shot of it:

I initially envisioned Ocular as a 1930s pulp vigilante in the vein of The Shadow, but his uniform looks more villainous, so I briefly included him with my bad guy crew, and then I kitbashed two of the figures from the HISS Tank three-pack to serve as his minions, Red Queen and Hivemind:

I eventually decided on a strange narrative justification for a more or less heroic vigilante wearing what almost looks like a Nazi uniform; I'll share it at the end of this post.

In the meantime, having fallen hard for the Crimson Sleepwalker, I knew I'd found my new favorite toy series, but I had a long wait before I could acquire additional Monster Force figures; the first wave had already sold out, and the wait for those to restock and preorders for the next waves to arrive was excruciating.

So I had only one recourse: kitbash a bunch of figures I already owned so I could slot them into a Monster Force context!

I already created a separate thread for my take on Major Bludd on another forum, so I'll try to show some restraint in this thread and share only my favorite portraits of him:

The whole damned planet has turned into a festering dunny. In all this bloody, blasted landscape, there's no cistern sufficiently tight or secure to prevent the gray, murky water from tasting like ash and acid, and there's no distance a man can walk that will take him to a place without monsters.

Mark me, now: I speak not of mere bad blokes like me, but proper monsters; skittering, scabrous horrors whose furtive existence casts aspersions (as if further interrogation were needed into the matter) on the notion of a loving god.

Times being what they are, I've been reduced on occasion to throwing in my lot with the monsters; clearly, Feng Menglong had it right: better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos.

But no worries. While the world is a broken place of disarray and despair, a cracked and colorless emptiness with no warmth and no comfort, there are indications that she'll be right eventually; reports from the North of teasing, flirting glimpses of blue sky for the first time in seven years, and rumors from afar of plant life rebounding in the territory formerly known as Montana.

Perhaps, in time, there will be healing. Maybe even sunshine.

Only one thing is certain: whether men or monsters hold sway over the world to come...

There will be Bludd.

I've shared already that these troubled times have reduced me to collaborating with literal monsters. (There ain't no bludgers in today's world, I'll say that much for it; we all chip in and do our part. Ain't no choice, really.)

Worse still, I team up on occasion with the blokes I once routinely shot at! Brogans that they are.

Mostly, it's Pulaski. Even now, after many skirmishes wherein we've saved one another's lives, we're not what you'd call mates. But aye, I respect him. Poor bastard was a bit ahead of the curve, where worlds gone wrong are concerned.

By our reckoning, there are at least seven distinct realities. Pulaski spent years in a world wherein Cobra wiped out Joe; held his own skeleton in his arms, which had to be a right proper mindfuck.

Together, we've visited worlds where things never got broken like they are here; no monsters, nowhere near the same degree of pollution. Although in one of those worlds, a superflu wiped out most of the humans.

One world seems to have never had any people at all. That's the one where I hope to end my days.

Meantime, here we are, me n' Pulaski, back in the acid and smoke.

For our sins.

And don't get me started on this motherfucker.

His proper moniker is Leviathan, but we can't have him putting on airs, so I call him Levi. Pisses him off good n' proper, but I can't be bothered. Bloke looks like a walking herpes sore and smells like a five-dollar whore; he'll answer to Levi and like it.

When he talks, it sounds like a plunger sucking at a stopped-up dunny, all squishy and gargling and growling and slurping. Fishy bastard that he is.

Mind, he could gut me with one swipe as if *I* were the fish, so I sometimes share my whiskey with him of an evening.



Moving on, I had already taken Croc Master in a somewhat bizarre direction, so he fit my new preferred tone and aesthetic rather easily:

Wolf-Killer Gung-Ho also has a thread all his own elsewhere, so I'll share just a few portraits here (and I promise, more portraits of actual Monster Force figures are showing up in a moment):

As a young child, Gung-Ho’s bedtime stories were harrowing tales from Cajun folklore, including the terrifying exploits of The Rougarou, Le Feu Follet, The Grunch, and The Honey Island Swamp Monster. Though he briefly suffered from nightmares due to these stories, Gung-Ho dismissed them at a young age as nonsense, and his worldview was dominated by logic and secularism throughout his adolescence and early adulthood.

Having graduated from Airborne School, Recondo School, and Marine Ordnance School, Gung-Ho served with distinction in G.I. Joe, where his strength, battle-readiness, and courage made him one of that elite team’s most valuable assets. And through it all, Gung-Ho never spared a thought for the silly fairy tales of his childhood… until the day when he led a small squad on an exploratory mission into an abandoned Terror Drome deep within the Choco-Darien rainforests, where they ran afoul of a werewolf.

Gung-Ho was the lone survivor.

The altercation spanned a mere seven minutes, but that was enough to cost Gung-Ho not only several friends, but also his worldview and his locus of control. On that day, he retreated into an aggrieved and angry silence, scorning all attempts at outreach and support from colleagues. A Marine through and through, Gung-Ho could not allow himself the vulnerability required to pursue counseling, and so, as he had done in countless knife-fights and bare-knuckle brawls in his teens and early twenties, Gung-Ho processed his trauma through violence.

Now, he finds solace only through his growing collection of werewolf pelts.

“Turns out The Rougarou is real; guess I shoulda listened more closely to Granny’s stories. Maybe I can’t bring back my brothers and sisters in arms, but every silver bullet I place between the eyes of one of those vicious sonsabitches helps me sleep a little better.”

Though crazier and scarier than ever, Gung-Ho is a member in good standing of G.I. Joe, Monster Force, and The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.


A few other Joe and Cobra agents recruited to Monster Force:

And now for some no-foolin' figures from Operation: Monster Force!

First up, Doctor Caligari:

I placed his distinctive head onto the body of the Aerial Sleepwalker, simply because I liked that body more. Here's a lazy kitbash I created of Caligari as he might have appeared in the Victorian era:

Here is Caligari's actual body, which I weathered a bit and topped with Croc Master's head and a Hiss Tank three-pack helmet:

I gave him the placeholder name Night Adder, after the badass Rise of Cobra figure (not that he's necessarily supposed to be that character), but since he looks like a natural companion for Caligari, who can control people via dreams and hypnosis, I was thinking of paying tribute to Stephen King by naming him after the title character in King's 2013 sequel to The Shining: Doctor Sleep.

This next fella is the Delta Red Nocturnal Operations Trooper, but again, I'm no troop-builder, so initially I used the head from a Star Wars Black Cobb Vanth, then I pivoted to a Thor head for a lazy Rock n' Roll, before settling on Heimdall's head for a world-weary monster-hunting take on Stalker:

Up next, one of my most eagerly anticipated figures, a descendant of The Invisible Man, Griffin The Eraser:

While I hope to eventually procure the Monster Force Big Bad, The Forgotten King, he is simultaneously more clean and more buff than I would prefer, so for now I put together my own weird iteration:

Another of the Monster Force figures I was most eager to procure is Donner Party, who serves as a stand-in for Frankenstein's Monster. However, having read a harrowing book about what the poor folks in the Donner Party endured (Daniel James Brown's The Indifferent Stars Above), I wasn't comfortable utilizing him in that context, so I decided to turn my Donner Party figure into an Old West werewolf hunter, for which I utilized the Cobb Vanth head I now had sitting around:

I awoke smothered in the cold and the damp and the dark, with no memory of how I'd come to be buried. Through fate's fickle mercies, mine was a shallow grave; my hands afterwards were torn asunder, but I was able to dig myself out, whereupon I was greeted by still another surprise in the form of an infant, swaddled in a muddy blanket and sleeping fitfully at the foot of the grave.

My grave.

In one tiny hand, she held a crow's feather. The other clutched a silver bullet.

McClymonds is my name. That much I know for certain. Augustus Colton McClymonds. Of my life before the grave, I recall just enough to leave me grateful for the forgetting; I was not a man distinguished by his wisdom or moral rectitude.

More surprises awaited me; come the blood moon, my visage changes. Not in the manner of a werewolf, you understand; I hunt them sumbitches down. (All 'cept one.)

No, for reasons I can't ken, I wake at each blood moon a changed man; new hair and eyes, different body. Same old me on the inside, though; confused, my memories riddled with holes, my past a threadbare burden and my path forward uncertain at best.

Same name, no matter the face: McClymonds. Although I answer to other names as well, mostly foisted onto me by the writers of the many exaggerated penny dreadful accounts of my curse and my exploits: Gravedigger. Blood Moon. Badlands. The Saint of Killers.

For want of any better ideas (no great thinker, me, neither before the grave nor after), I named the baby girl Silver, on accounta the bullet she carried when I found her.

I have little experience with youngsters, but I gather they're typically loud n' demanding. Not my lil' Silver; she don't make a peep. Not even when I let fly the bullets at a wolf.

Not even when the moon grows full, and she changes.

I ain't discerning about wolves; I kill all of 'em I find. (All 'cept one.) And I don't know precisely how I'll figure it out, but I tell myself that, come the day I find the one who turned my lil' Silver into what she is, I'll know him by sight. And I swear by all that's purer and more worthy than my cursed self (and that's a considerable list), there will be a reckoning.


Meanwhile, I used Donner Party's head and neck on the Big Ben body for my own Monster Force version of Frankenstein's Monster:

This head and these guns sure make this Joe body pop:

I looked forward to Halloween Boy for months before learning he is a comic book character! I'd assumed he was created for Monster Force. Here I paired him with the Marvel Legends Hallow's Eve figure, since they compliment one another's aesthetic so well:

You know you've got it bad for a toy series when you start weathering and accessorizing the stands that are included with each figure:

In closing, the leader of the heroes is Declan Van Helsing:

He captured my imagination more than I'd expected, but I decided to make him look more careworn and battle-weary, so I replaced his head with that of a McFarlane Toys Witcher:

(Biblical Adventures St. Michel.)

And since I had two of that head, I gave one of them a stealth/warpaint makeover:

And here is my short dialogue exchange between Declan and Ocular, which accounts for Ocular's disturbing aesthetic:

"Doctor, I can't help but notice that you adorn yourself in the same style of fussy, fetishistic, Nazi-adjacent uniform as Caligari and his ilk. I confess I've never heard of a fascist vengeance demon, although I suppose the notion isn't completely counterintuitive. Hell, maybe all vengeance demons are fascists."

"I am no fascist, Van Helsing, and this is no uniform; it is my skin. The Rachedämon who cursed me has a regrettable flair for the ironic; he knew that mine was a left-leaning ethos, and so he clad his bleeding-heart puppet in this fascist flesh. I can never remove it. Such is the cost of a moment's cowardice."

"And you're cursed to play out this mission forever?"

"I like to believe that my maker boasts some small measure of mercy, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Perhaps one day I will have earned the right to once again wear my own face. Or better still, to die; I pray that this cursed gun will someday work on me."

"And in the meantime, you want to join our team."

"What I propose is a very... loose affiliation."

"But you do wish to use your 'cursed, magical gun' to help us kill our enemies? To punish them for their atrocities?"

"I kill anyone whose atrocities are sufficiently cruel to warrant the revocation of his right to life. I have no doubt that I will account for a good number of your enemies. But I am equally certain I will likewise claim some of your allies."

"Excuse me?"

"I do not serve the left or the right, Van Helsing. I act on behalf of no nation. I exist only to cleanse the world of gräueltat. In this great 'monster war' of yours, do you honestly believe that one side is purely noble and the other wholly evil?"

"Of course not, but nevertheless..."

"Van Helsing, would you like to know what I see when my gaze falls upon you?"


More in the next post...