In a World all of his own

By Robert Covarrubias

Of all of the Customizers that I have had the pleasure to meet and all of the custom work that I have been able to see, none can compare to the creative and very expressive customs of Mr. Paul Data. Mr. Data is a man of many talents which include professional musician, photographer, collector, Customizer and author with a book he hopes to publish soon entitled, WWII Scrap book; the life and times of a real G.I. Joe. Unfortunately Paul is also disabled with lots of spinal problems. Though still mobile but only through great effort’s Paul still manages to live his life as an artist and has taken time out of his busy schedule to chat with me and tell me about his amazing custom figures. Not only did I get a glimpse inside the world of this unique Customizer but a glimpse into the world of a true artist.

 

RC: First, I have to say that your custom figures are one of the most original and interesting to look at, how many do you knock off in a week?

PD: I got to a point where I would build two figures at a time…4 to5 in one week. Most of my best work was done after my divorce…I went into it like therapy. On average I made 1to2 a week over the past 5-6 years.

RC: What was the first custom you created?

PD: The very first customs were the skeletons about 1998-99 when 21 st was putting out stuff and Dragon was first starting. I’ve also been writing a book for the last 5 years about the WWII experiences of a close friend of mine who fought in some very heavy combat in New Guinea and was very severely damaged by it. He was also a photographer, professionally before and after the war; he acquired an archive of over 450 never before seen or published negatives all of which he had shot during the war. The military thing is really what got me started. I was collecting Dragon figures and I remember thinking what incredible disparity between these pretty shiny nice figures and these increasingly horrible stories that old Joe was beginning to tell me because as I got more and more into his psyche he learned to trust me more and started telling me stories that he had never shared with anybody. I’m also a collector of old WWII items, back to the figures, I actually started building skeleton figures and dead guys cause it just sort of fit in more in my mind with what I was hearing about how destructive and horrible it all was.

RC: When did you start posting your pictures for other people to see?

PD: As far as posting I started posting stuff on the 6 th division and my stuff was kind of barely tolerated there because they have a tendency to not like anything that’s too thought provoking. About a year ago I was posting pictures of skeleton soldiers and dead guys and guys with half their face blown off…you know and stuff like that…just what soldiers really look like when they go through battle, then eventually I just kind of stopped posting there because I realized that it was not appreciated and it was kind of over most of their heads…I was pretty exclusively into doing WWII era stuff I started the very 1 st Animorph, that’s what I call the animal heads. The very 1 st Animorph that I did was an SS guard with the head of a Doberman Pincher and he had the police gorget on so he was in fact a SS police and in WWII they used to call the SS police chained dogs because of the gorget and chain that they wore around their neck and because everybody hated them so much so, my very first one was a chained dog so he had some background in actual history. Then I re-discovered a very famous artist from the WWII period, a fellow by the name of Arthur Szyk, he was one of the only artist that ever had a price on his head by the Nazis and they hated him so much because he did very unflattering propaganda posters about the

Nazis, he was a Jew and he eventually wound up in the states and had a very successful career as an illustrator doing all kinds of stuff. But during the war he was most famous for pictures of like….well he did pictures of SS madness, skeletons and other ones with animal heads and beast heads...I mean all of those prejudices that were so on the surface during WWII were evident in this guys propaganda and I just got a kick out of it and thought hey I should start doing figures that kind of continue in this tradition of the propaganda of the times. There was no such thing as political correctness they just told it like it was…so I kind of went through that stuff and I did a bunch of bizarre WWII themed propaganda stick type pieces, I think couple of the more mentionable ones would be the one of Herman Goering, he’s got the head of a big hog and I think I re-named him Hogmann Boaring, so that was one of them. Most of my stuff is one of but I made about six of the Death on the Eastern Front which was basically a 1:6 skeleton kit heavily weathered with a long trench coat that came from the 21 st century eastern front carded set…so that was a fairly inexpensive kit or custom for me to build because I could pick up those carded sets and the skeleton kit for under twenty bucks and then I only basically had eight hours or so of work into it so those I was selling for about two hundred bucks a piece, then I sold a bunch

of those at various Joe Shows. But the big change over for me the most liberating thing for me was that I was really started to burn out on WWII and that’s when I started doing all the fantasy stuff…of the bizarre Knights and that kind of thing. So I seldom do WWII themed stuff anymore at this point I’m more into just really free association like for instance I did this one fairly recent…in the last four or five months and its called the Knight of Nought, and you see when he takes his helmet off that his chain maille hood is empty, so there’s like nothing…there’s nobody there and that was autobiographical I was basically expressing how I felt at the time.

 

RC: So, basically since the beginning all of the customs that you have created stem from some kind of personal experience or story that you’ve heard.

PD: yeah…

RC: Did you create these customs with the intention of selling them or just as a hobby?

PD: Hobby, therapy certain ones I made with the intentions of selling. Like when I made several copies of the Eastern Front guys, the one with the long coat… that’s the skeleton I made specifically to sell because I knew guys wanted them, even guys that weren’t 1:6 collectors like military and guys that would have a whole room full of Nazi daggers or that kind of thing which I used to collect big time would love to have one of my skeleton guys just sort of sitting somewhere in the middle of it all cause its just such a focal point.

RC: Let’s talk about some of your customs, tell me about Baron Samdi.

PD: Well, Baron Samdi comes from the Haitian tradition of Carnival and Mardi Gras and stuff like that, he’s is a deity…I’ve picked up all this voodoo stuff because some of the drumming that I do is Haitian voodoo drumming. But Baron Samdi is one of the voodoo deities he’s considered to be the gatekeeper of the cemeteries and if you go to New Orleans, to Mardi Gras you’ll always see Baron Samdi dancing around. He’s probably the best known of the voodoo type characters.

RC: What about Dr. Hertz?

PD: Dr. Hertz is a doctor who tortured me at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital, that’s his actual name he was the head of the pain management clinic and one of his under links was doing a procedure on me and it went very badly and I ended up with post-traumatic stress and Dr. Hertz was suppose to look into it as the director of the program and he did absolutely nothing.

PC: Again I find it amazing that while some people choose to write about their experiences in some form of poetry, journal or book you create custom figures out of them.

PD: I’m also a published writer. I’ve had as story recently published in a very highly regarded on-line literary magazine called www.ducts.org and they’re publishing another one of my stories in the spring and I have this WWII book that I’ve been working on for ages. But I’ve done a lot of writing over the years. I also have a couple of years of freelance model making experience making props for print ads and television commercials and movies and stuff like that…again with my disability I couldn’t keep up with those hours so I had to kind of let that go, but that’s were I’ve picked up a lot of technique…was working in the model shops.

RC: You’re figures have a lot of detail on them, where do you get the props and weapons and accent pieces that either attaches to the figure or their clothing?

PD: I keep…pre well stocked loose parts bin, Battle Rhino, you familiar with those guys?

RC: No

PD: Battle Rhino, actually the website is www.thebattlerhino.com they break down all the IGNITE stuff and the DML stuff…all of the figures they break down into lose parts, so you go on there and just buy a bow n arrow or you just buy a pair of boots or you can just buy a set of chain maille and you make your own. A lot of the parts I got like that, I do a lot of swaps with guys around the country with guys who make hand made swords, etc…some of them might be stuff that I re-tailored like guy size stuff to fit a female figure cause I really like doing what they call non-traditional casting which is doing a female figure in a warrior type get-up. I also used to do a lot of SS female figures like ilsa of the SS very fetish type figures. I don’t know what the deal is doing the non-traditional casting I just think its sort of adds to the appeal and maybe adds a little bit to the shock value of a figure to see like a gorgeous female gladiator as opposed to a male. But I fabricate some stuff from scratch I build stuff out of sculpty and epoxy and metal and I do a lot of leather stuff, like leather parts and strapping and that sort of thing. You should understand that all of the custom work that I do including taking the photos is done within a 2ft sq area.

RC: What do you usually sell your figures for?

PD: Oh a huge, huge range…it ultimately comes down to how many hours I have into it how much cost of materials I have into it, for instance when I was building those skeleton figures it would literally take…I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Airfix 1:6 scale skeleton model kit it’s a styrene model kit? It’s the best one going because it’s the kind of plastic you can do anything with its not like these Halloween skeletons that are made of the soft rubbery plastic that you cant paint or do anything…to build up the Airfix model it’s over 50 pieces and to intergrade it at the same time in with the uniform and then do all the weathering add the articulation you’re looking at a minimum of 8-10 hours plus the cost of the kits, the skeleton and whatever uniform, so a figure like that I was getting a couple of hundred bucks for which I felt at the time was considerably under priced but nonetheless the market wouldn’t pay anymore so that’s what they were going for.

RC: Thank you so much for the interview

PD: My pleasure, if I would like any point emphasized…I am a disabled artist and I consider this to be very, very valuable therapy and I encourage folks to get their toys out of the boxes and get their X-Acto knives out and start chopping them up putting them back together in ways that maybe can tell a story or maybe can make them feel better or you never know what things lead to. I was approached at a G.I. Joe show several years ago by a rep from Blue Box and I had meetings with them at one point they were gonna actually license some of my stuff…

RC: Wow, what happened?

PD: Well, like everything else it fell through (laughs) they had their Cy Girls and their WWII stuff and all of this planned out and as I said to the rep…they were looking at skeleton soldiers as a property and I said “this will give you guys a real leg up because you can talk about a whole political correct or politically incorrect aspect of war”…”you can say that this is an educational toy for kids teaching them how bad war is”…but it was over their heads (laughs)

See more of this great artists work here..