This is Kikaider, yet another of Mr. Ishimori's many masterpieces.

Kikaider is a story of the suffering of a young man named Jiro, whose body is a machine. ("Kikai" means "Machine" in Japanese.)
"Kamen Rider"'s machine properties were added to his body during his life; Kikaider, however, has been a machine from the beginning.
"Kikaider" is the story of how Jiro attempts to live a human life despite having a machine body.

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This is Boya Harumichi from "CROWS".
This figure arrived this week. This particular figure is only attainable if you order it from a catalog that comes packaged in a game magazine.
You can see that Boya Harumichi is wearing a T-shirt from "Super Radical Gag Family", a manga serialized in Shonen Champion Magazine.

There are actually many limited edition Boya Harumichi figures like this. I'll have to show you some more later.
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"Aura Battler Dunbine" is another of "Gundam" creator Mr. Tomino's famous works.

The Aura Battler is a strategic weapon of Byston Well, an alternate world hidden from human perception.

The story behind it is fascinating -- far too fascinating to explain in a simple blog post.

Suffice it to say that at one point partway through the story, the setting switches to our human world.

The city of Dublin, Ireland figures very significantly into the story.

Here we see Ultraman battling Red King in the mountains.
Ultraman is in the midst of trying to throw Red King using the wrestling technique known as a "flying mare".
This is a rather famous scene in the Ultraman canon.
The modeling of the plastic on this particular figure is exuisite.
Mr. Toru Narita is responsible for most of the monster designs seen in "Ultraman" and "Ultra Seven".
Some of Mr. Narita's drawings are displayed on the bookshelves in the Grasshopper offices.

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This is a figure of Makoto-Chan, main character of gag / horror manga artist Mr. Kazuo Uemzu's most renowned work, "Makoto-Chan".

This figure sits on the desk of Yuking, a member of the Grasshopper planning department. Every time I get angry at him, he goes back to his desk and looks at this figure, and he feels better!

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People consider Kamen Rider (Masked Rider) to be the pioneering tokusatsu hero.

This particular figure happens to be the first of the Kamen Riders.

He used to be a human being; however, an evil organization known as Shocker modified his body, making it possible for him to transform into Kamen Rider.

The game "PROTOTYPE", announced this year, is currently being anticipated by Japanese Kamen Rider fans because of its transformation sequences.
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This figure is of Hanaki Guriko, who's said to be the strongest fighter in "WORST" the sequel to the manga "CROWS".

"CROWS" and "WORST" are both manga that present the reader with stories of highly troubled youths. Though all these troubled youths ever seem to do is fight, I find something irresistably pure about their coming-of-age stories.
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This figure is from a Japanese robot animation series called "Heavy Metal L-Gaim".

As you might have noticed, there are many Japanese animation serials concerning robots. These serials are generally divided into two types.

The first type is the "Super Robot" -- special robots with unrealistic powers, like "Getter Robo", who we talked about last time.

Hello. I'm back from San Francisco. Sorry for taking a week off.

When I was at GDC, I met some people who said they've been reading my blog here. It made me realize how big EDGE truly is.
So here's today's figure. It's an Ultraman series monster -- well, let's not call it that.

It's more accurate to describe it as a Baltan-Seijin. (Baltan is a planet, and "Seijin" means "alien from the planet of").

Hello, EDGE readers.
Thank you for leaving so comments on my blog.

I've been at GDC in San Francisco all this week, so I've been unable to show you any new fig

There was an incident involving a plane at Narita Airport, so my plane was delayed. I managed to make it to San Francisco in time, though.

This is a picture of my breakfast, while I thought over what I was going to talk about at my panel.