‘Robot 13′ Action Figure on the Way From Indie Toymaker Motorbot

Sometimes it takes a robot to know a robot. In the case of Thomas Hall and Daniel Bradford's highly stylized "Robot 13," which follows the action-packed adventures of a disembodied skull housed in a mighty robot body circa 1939, it took the collaboration of toy master Motorbot (a.k.a. Kevin Olson) to make the hero come alive. This collaboration bore prototype fruit a few weeks back at New York Comic Con when the Blacklist Studios displayed an unfinished R13 toy and full-sized skull at its booth. I missed the items at the show, but hit up Hall and Olson to learn more about the upcoming toybotage.

Sculpted by Olson, the non-posable resin toy could change poses between now and its currently unspecified release date, but will come packaged with the honk'n skull and may be released in both standard and variant colorways.

Hall fleshed out the duo's general toy plan of attack a bit, stating that Blacklist and Motorbot plan to release limited runs of the figure through Olson's Deadbear online toy store as well as Blacklist's more R13-centric shop. Once the final toy molds are produced and approved, fans will know a lot more about how much they can expect to pay to become the proud owner of their own robot and, quite possibly, toys based on Blacklist's "King" series, which casts Elvis as a monster slayer.

"In the designer toy world, so much of it falls under 'fair use parody' or is straight up bootlegging, and few people actually make the deals with the copyright owners, especially when it comes to comic book properties. In this case, we already had a relationship with Kevin when he mentioned that he would love to do figures of our characters. The discussions on that were very quick - basically he pitched us what he wanted to do and we decided to make it happen," said Hall.

"I've dreamed of working with a comic book company since I was nine, and Blacklist is a fun group of guys with crazy ideas. We have a lot of things planned that should start popping up next year," said Olson.

Check out some tighter shots of the prototype provided by Hall below: