The Mythic Legions action figure customs of Jeremy Girard

Bowstring Flick and Wooden Thud

A few months ago, I had my Gothitropolis White Raven figure fall from his spot atop one of my display cases, breaking his leg in the process. I replaced that broken figure with a new one, leaving me with some parts for my fodder bin that I wanted to try to use. Looking for some inspiration in a Dungeons & Dragons’ Monster Manual, I came across the Kenku.

In D&D, Kenku are wingless bird-men who can mimic any voice they hear. They take their names from specific sounds relevant to their abilities or weapons (where is where the names for these characters came from). Looking online images of Kenku, I found some great artwork of this race and knew it would be a good way to use my broken white raven. In fact, I liked the result of my Kenku custom so much, that I ended up making a second one using a Black Raven figure from Gothitropolis!

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Recipe

The body on these two started with those aforementioned Raven figures. I pulled apart the arms and lower bodies and attached them to Mythic Legions’ torsos (the black Kenku uses a Gorgo toros with the red parts repainted purple and the white Kenku uses a Sir Ignatius torso - even though you can't see these parts with the robes on, I wanted them to be color accurate to the designs). The toros pieces are not a perfect fit with the lower legs, so I used some blue tack to get them pieces to stick together. The end result is not perfect, but the figures display fine, and since I am not actually playing with the toys, it is a fine compromise to get the look I wanted to for these figures.

One of the main features of the Kenku, other than their lack of wings, is the robes that they wear. The robes on my Kenku customs use a piece from a Lord of the Rings Legolas (the Council of Elrond version) for the main body of the robe and a hood sliced off of a Marvel Legends Doom figure. The two pieces do not connect together, and you can see the separation on the two pieces from the back, but with the way I have these displays in my collection, the robes and hoods look like one piece, so once again, I am OK with this compromise.

The robe on the white Kenku actually uses the original color that the piece came in, so all I had to do was paint the hood to match. For the black Kenku, I painted both the robe and the hood.

The final touch for these figures were their weapons. I gave the white Kenku a wooden staff from an Articulated Icons figure (the original artwork of the Kenku from the very old D&D Fiend Folio book wields a wooden staff), while the black Kenku became an archer, with a bow from a Lord of the Rings Orc Warrior and a quiver/arrows from a Faramir ranger figure.