I’ve always gone to big events and been impressed by the effort other people have gone through to display their miniatures. Over the years I’ve seen entire castles, swamps, military bases and more, so this year I’ve decided to take the plunge and make something of my own.
On top of that, I’ve always given myself the excuse of: “How would I transport something like that to the venue,” but next month there will be a big event right here in my home city of London, so there are no excuses left!
I knew that as Marvel Crisis: Protocol is a game of comic book superheroes I really wanted to make something to reflect that. I’ve previously made a comic book movement tray which you could consider the 1.0 version, but now I thought it was time to do something bigger and better!
Planning
I started with planning everything out on paper. Before any measuring or cutting I wanted to make sure I everything I wanted to include would fit onto the rough structure. I knew I wanted to take Hydra to the event as I’ve been playing them recently and they have become even better with the new crisis rotation.
The issue I’ve always had in my head playing Hydra is that they’re the Nazi faction and I’m not a fan of Nazis (controversial I know). So I thought to myself what if they are past all that? Why can’t a bunch of Germans try to take over the world without being accused of being Nazis. I took this thought and ran with it!
To start creating the board I had to start with the models I knew would be in the roster. The base sizes of the models dictate the overall size of the piece as they are the one aspect that can’t change. I knew roughly that I wanted it to be like a comic book so initially I planned on having it the size of an A4 piece of paper. Unfortunately once I lay everything out roughly where the bases were it all appeared a little too squashed together. Based on this, I extended it so that it was slightly larger than A4 size which gave enough room for everything I wanted.
Making a paper version was a quick and cheap way to figure out the dimensions before cutting and chopping anything meaningful. I recommend anyone doing this to do similar.
Making the Main Structure
Next step was making the board itself. I am by no means a carpenter, but I had some leftover medium density fiberboard (MDF) from some recent DIY and had no use for it otherwise. I used the paper from the test board as a template to show what pieces I needed to cut. Laying everything out before I started to cut anything helped visualize things. Measure twice cut once as they say.
As I wanted the board to be at an angle, I had to make sure that the ‘podium’s that the minis were put on were also cut at an angle. A better carpenter might have been able to find the perfect angle to do this. The only setting I could reliably use on my saw was to cut at 45 degrees so I kept it that way. I also had to create ‘legs’ to support the main structure and by keeping everything at 45 degrees I knew that the board would be angled while the minis would stand flat.
To secure the podiums to the main structure I found some small screws which I used a power drill to put into the MDF. An unexpected side effect was that in places the MDF split so I would have to hide this with clever use of the foam later on.
I also secured the legs to the backing with screws but I soon found that although it was secure vertically, it quickly broke when pushed horizontally. To fix this I found more spare wood to reinforce the backing using hot glue this time as I was afraid of more wood splitting.
All these little mistakes were annoying at the time but were a good learning process for if I attempt something like this again.
After the main structure was completed I used black primer all over to give something for the glue and paint to stick to later.
Other than the wood and screws I already had there were only 2 things I bought to complete this project. One was EVA foam sheets with a 2mm thickness which formed the basis for most of the comic book backing. The other was ‘self adhesive rubber ferrite’ to put onto the podiums to make them magnetically receptive so that my magnetized minis were less likely to fall off.
Creating the Comic Panels
First step in creating the comic panels was to cover the entire backing in EVA foam. In hindsight this might have been easier to do before putting the podiums on but I knew that they would be covered in paper anyway so any small gaps would be covered up in the next step. I then measured out where I wanted the comic boarders to be and cut 1cm strips of EVA foam to represent the boarders of each comic panel. All of the Foam sheets were stuck down with modge podge as the adhesive. I did this mainly because it was the only glue I had to hand PVA might have been better.
Once the foam backing had been added, I started work on the comics themselves. I’ve dabbled in a bit of drawing in the past though I wouldn’t consider myself an artist. I had already planned what I wanted to include within each panel and googled reference images for anything I wanted to draw. I began by penciling the main outlines and once I was happy used felt markers to colour it all in. I don’t own expensive copic markers so I used some relatively cheap Chinese ones I got online, which did an effective job.
I knew that I wanted this to be a 3D comic book so once the background was done for the different panels I drew out additional images that were put onto more foam sheets to make them ‘pop’. You can see for example on the Beta Ray Bill panel that the rainbow bridge is coming out of the page which then ties with Bill himself being on a Rainbow bridge base.
Creating the Speech Bubbles
For the speech bubbles I didn’t trust myself to write them out by hand so made them in word. I knew that I wanted these to be coming out of the page and initially I wanted to use chopsticks or something similar to make them stick out. I quickly realized that sticks were too thin and might pierce the foam so I needed something thicker. Then it came to me, staring at me the whole time. The hot glue sticks themselves were perfect to mount the speech bubbles. They are thick enough that they won’t pierce the foam, bendy enough that they won’t just snap if knocked, and to stick them down all i had to do was touch them to the end of the hot glue gun to make one end sticky!
Final Touches
As good as it was now looking I needed a way to stand out from the other display boards and I had already jokingly did the voices to my friends. I had a small bluetooth speaker I’ve previously used to put inside an emperor’s children land raider and this time I would use it to play on a loop in the venue a recording of me reading out the display board in silly voices.
Voila, display board done.
Closing
I’m very happy with how the board turned out. Since making it I’ve also realized that it doesn’t need to be used just for that event. When storing my minis at home it’s nice to have some of them mounted on that board rather than just in the display case normally.
I’m looking forward to my next project and seeing what display board I might come up with next.
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