A Minor Reaper Mousling Rant

After posting about Reaper's Bones II Kickstarter yesterday, and the kids nestled up in their beds asleep, I sauntered over to there website to see what I've missed over the summer.   The Reaper listings for the Game Trade Magazine I use for my Apathy columns are woefully inaccurate and incomplete, so I'm never completely surprised to discover some new line or other changes.  I also get a lot of traffic for mouselings/mouslings/redfern/mouse guard miniatures, so to keep up with those releases just seems natural.

Not much has changed, except this figure:



01526 Madame Gorgonzola, 2013 Convention Miniature

My head tilted in confusion.  I could not find anything under "Mouslings" in their search function, and this was listed in their "Greens" section, which I thought was reserved for pending or very recent models.  The $4.99 price tag seemed steep, but this is a great looking figure, one of which I would gladly swap for the Samurai in the Kickstarter.  The samurai mousling looks so out of place, and is barely usuable unless they package a small army unit, but that's another rant.

Finally, through Google, I find her listed as a product on the website as well as under a "Mousling" tab that I confirmed through the website I could not get to via normal means.

The listing did include the disclaimer,

We include this picture for the sake of historical accuracy. This figure is no longer produced and is not available from us at all.

Now, this is a standard on their products, as I remember it on "Mr Squiggles" set.  It should be enough for me to just go "Oh well, I missed it," and get on with my life, but I'm miffed by this.  It's not some GW GameDay Space Marine captain that hordes of people get and throw on eBay, it's a decent if overpriced sculpt that deserves to see the light of day outside of the convention events.  To add insult to injury, the Google search pulled up a painted version on their website:

It's a tiny figure, as all mouslings are, and the scarf, apron, and babushka are top notch.  That fur, though, is just awful!  Yes, it's white, and that's nigh impossible to get right, but detail sculpted into the  face, the lack of contrast, and the overdone make-up (which is correct, she is a gypsy fortune teller after all) just make this look amatuer and takes away from all the effort that was done on the rest of the figure.

I don't know why a tiny figure I'll never get my hands on is producing this result.  It's not as if I don't have enough mousling and Eureka mice warriors I still haven't gotten around to painting.