The Mekon - Part 1

Many moons ago (the 1980s) I discovered Dan Dare through a Tiger oversize luxury reprint of the "Voyage to Venus", which had run for over a year in the pages of "Eagle" from 1950.  In that volume I found myself swept up in the very first adventure of Colonel Dan Dare and his friends and they journeyed to Venus in search of answers to problems on Earth.
That first story also introduced Dan's long-standing nemesis: the Mekon.

The Mekon was a wizened little creature clad in a lilac one-piece suit with oversized head... his massive intellect made up for his small stature. 
So weak was he that the Mekon needed a flying chair to ferry him about.

 

In the early 2000s I was fortunate enough to get one of the rare Day2Day Trading Dan Dare action figures in 1/6 scale.  The figure was an accurate representation of Dan as he appeared in the comic's early days, and there was the promise of more figures to come.  The next issue was to be Dan in his green Space Fleet uniform... Sadly the sales were so poor that the rest of the line was cancelled... so there would be no Mekon.

Then the other day I was trawling through Timeless Hobbies' website and there was a model kit of the Mekon in 1/6 scale... I pounced!

The model comes in a stout card box with the Mekon broken down into: head/neck, arms, legs and torso, all cast in a grey green resin with some prominent mould parting lines. 

There is no manufacturer's name on the box or enclosed instructions.  The suggestion of using car body filler and car primer shows the model's age.

The right hand is cast with a strange extrusion from the wrist, so they need separating and mating together at the right angle.  Why they did this baffles me.

The surface detail is good, but quite soft in places - I suspect this may be quite an old model.
The detail on the head is really nice and will reward some careful painting.

I will smooth off the eyes so that I can paint them more neatly.  The engraved detail will only hinder that process.

Since it is to be displayed with action figures my approach has to reflect that, so the painting of the figure has to be more subtle... so no forced shadows on the skin or clothing.

The onesie he wears will need the join between torso and legs filled and smoothed and then painted in such a way that it looks like clothing rather than solid vynil.  No idea how to do that just yet.

He comes with a vacuum formed lower half of his flying chair with a resin seating platform.

I cleaned up the vacform top edge and fixed a sheet of plasticard to it, tidying up the edges once the glue had properly dried.

This is a 'stack shot' of the model so far...

This is where I am so far...