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I was just thinking that the title of this post isn’t really saying all that much, since we’ll likely be having first somethings of 2007 all the way through December (barring something unfortunate happening to me or the lamentable closing of Scary-Crayon, anyway), but today we’ve got a double-whammy for you with Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash #93 and A Crayon Haiku #57. And both of them feature TURTLE POWER!
The haiku is a relatively simple affair — I just had the idea while taking screencaps of the backgrounds in TMNT IV: Turtles in Time for potential use in this and subsequent Hot Flashes — but the comic itself was a pretty time-consuming affair. I know it probably doesn’t look it, but I spent so much time extracting the figures and selecting backgrounds and fooling with those stupid shadows (note to self: leave shadows out of future comics) that I considered making this an official Dusty Plastic HELL issue. I think I’m going to set a tentative minimum of seven panels for those, though. Anyway, the issue highlighted in the comic — action figures not set to scale — is actually one that kind of bothers me. (Not in the way that social issues, politics, etc., bother me, but still.) I know that most TMNT fans are pretty pleased with the new movie figures, but I’m personally not all that keen on them. In addition to featuring crappy paint jobs and multiple blemishes — I sorted through a ton of figures before finally deciding on this Raph — the 6″ figures are too tall to really look right next to any of the other TMNT characters from the old or new series.
This latest offense has only furthered my belief that there should be some kind of scale standard among action figures that determines how tall the figure will be based on the fictional character’s height, thereby ensuring that interactions between the characters will be more/less visually accurate on the plastic plane. It’d be neat if all action figure companies adhered to the scale guidelines — it’s not cool when the Turtles dwarf Batman — but companies should at least be consistent within their own licenses. Just once it would be neat to have a Wolverine figure that isn’t capable of looking Venom in the eye without having to crane his neck a bit.
Not sure I’ll have the next segment of Krang’s Big Adventure ready for our three-year anniversary on the 25th, but I should at least have a new TMNT-related Hot Flash to post. Hopefully I’ll have another article or two for you as well. Anyway, see you then, minna-san! 
Scale guidelines? That’d be awesome! I’m half-asleep right now, so perhaps I might fail to be coherent, but I think that having a system like that for action figures would be the best thing since… mushroom ravioli!
Ideally, I’d say there should be, in my humble opinion, 2 sets of standards. The first standard would 5″ scale and the second standard would be 12″ scale. There would be no others, because then we’d be back to how things actually are and, as you said, the Turtles will end up dwarfing Batman.
Now, one really cool thing, I think, would be if characters not only adhere to this uniform, but also have size relation between them. For example, April is supposed to be considerably taller than the turtles, so she would be made accordingly.
As much as I really like the really old Turtles action figures, it always kinda… bugged me that Super Shredder was the same size as regular Shredder.
As for the new movie toys… the whole “bigger than the other figures” thing is kinda the sole reason I haven’t bought any of them. Needless to say, I’m still going to definitely watch that movie, come March 23rd. Even if the action figures based on said movie don’t impress me much, it does not differ my opinions about the upcoming movie… but then, why should they? Ha! I am rambling… perhaps I should go to bed before I end up writing a flippin’ book here as opposed to a simple response.