towards the end they got a much better body and threw Punisher, Daredevil, Bullseye and maybe some others on it,
You know... people say this, but I rather wildly disagree. I bought that Punisher and the DD, because I'm a big Punisher fan and I liked the potential for that new body. And it sucked. Looked good in theory, but it felt flimsy, the articulation still wasn't where it needed to be, and they actively fell apart sometimes during posing (the legs were terrible). They were bad figures.
The best you could argue is that they would have been fairly solid for a first-time toy company. But these were coming from the defacto masters of 4" action figures.
It's like they learned all the wrong lessons from their failed takeover of Marvel Legends and decided the problem wasn't the piss-poor articulation and piss-poor construction, but actually we just wanted shitty figures to be SMALLER. Yeah, that's it.
I don't know the lore of Solomon Witt...
He's (Sunok Studios/Solomon Witt) the utter dipshit that ran the Hell Screamerz (yup, with a fucking z) action figure Kickstarter. It ran concurrently with the first Dime Novel Legends Kickstarter back in 2016, so they were kind of cannibalizing each others' audience. It was a 4" line of EXTREEEEME futuristic soldiers. Kind of a watered down Warhammer 40k meets Halo meets Air Raiders in concept without all the cool giant space armor guys and more in the vein of cool-looking regular soldiers and pilots and dudes with jetpacks.
Pretty sure Bobby Vala (relevant to this topic) stole the skull mask design DIRECTLY from this Kickstarter since they're almost identical to the ones he did later on (Bone Smoker... Bone Sucker? I can't remember).
Anyway, it took forever, as first time AF Kickstarters usually do. He seemed to be making progress and would occasionally post pictures of what looked like prototypes and even later what looked like piles of production parts. But the updates came fewer and further between and Solomon started getting REALLY aggressive with people online asking for updates as the years rolled on. He was rude, dismissive, just generally a complete fucking asshole to anyone that even politely asked if there was a timeline for release or just wanting to know what was going on more generally.
And the updates continued to get further between and less substantial. Lots of excuses and finger pointing and 'I'm just doing the best I can' kind of shit. And ultimately, it's been 10 years just about and he walked away with almost 100k in other peoples' money and delivered nothing but excuses and some pictures of product no one will ever get in their collections.
I'm 100% not convinced that it was all a grift from the start. It seems he really was doing the thing he set out to do, but failed and refused to own it like a man and instead just kicked the ball down the road long enough to effectively disappear. So I don't think he was -intentionally- a thief. But it certainly ended up that way and I have less sympathy for him than I would anyone else because he was a fucking cunt about it literally the entire time.
