Tombstone

Tombstone is one of those figures that restores your faith in Rock Lords, if indeed you were fool enough to lose faith in the first place. Pretty much everything about him seems to work, he's got a solid concept and his rock mode doesn't look like he's covering his head with his arms and legs. Does he have faults? Well, yes, but they're more than mitigated.

The most striking thing about Tombstone is his face. It's a very reptile-like look, with long neck and head, a fanged mouth and a cool visor (though thanks to how he transforms, good luck finding one without any sort of paint scratches!). It's a theme that runs throughout his humanoid mode - he's lithe and thin, with long legs and claw-like arms.

He looks great! Giant shoulder pads - check! Big clumpy feet - check! Claw hands - check! You can even push his hips backwards to give a slightly better balanced humanoid mode, something that is barely noticeable but shows someone on the design team cared! He's got a brilliant range of motion on his legs too, in that they actually function as legs. They bend forwards and the knees bend in the correct manner (seriously, this is quite rare) and the legs even have a pivot to move them sideways, something that serves no purpose in his transformation and is just there to make the toy neater.  Sadly his arms aren't as great: they can only flap side to side. If they could move up and down too, he'd be near perfect in the articulation stakes.

Keeping with the lizard-like motif, Tombstone is really green. His main body is a deep rich sparkling green plastic which is really nice up close. There's a variation which uses a much flatter shade that I'll try to photograph at some point. His secondary colour is a light green, and even then only in small places such as the arms and neck, but his thinness means this isn't as much of a problem as it is on other figures because there's less of a mass of colour to break up.

Tombstone's weapon is the ominously-named 'The Reaper'. It's spectacularly unclear what it is - in fact one catalogue has Tombstone holding it by the top. Is it a really blunt axe? Is it a pizza slicer? A fan? It's impossible to know and gloriously weird. There are two colour variations, black and brown. The black one is nicer as it gives more of a contrast with the green body, but the brown one matches surprisingly well too.

Tombstone's transformation is simple but satisfying. Arms fold in to holes on the side and are covered by his shoulder pads, the legs fold in and the head goes into the chest hole. There's a certain fun charm to this, and he's probably the Rock Lord I've fiddled with the most.

His rock mode manages to disguise his various body parts well enough, and it's (sort of) an interesting shape. The slightly sparkly plastic really helps it pop and it's neat how such a tall thin humanoid can come from such a small rock.

Tombstone is great! Easily one of the more fun Rock Lords, it is just the strange side-to-side motion of his arms that lets him down, especially when compared to the rest of him. It's a minor complaint though - after all, this is a mid-eighties toy!