Hugues Martel with the Moonstone prototype Walk any collectibles convention and you'll see familiar faces at every turn. The heroes, villains and franchise icons that have defined the statue hobby for decades are still a big part of what makes it tick. We love plenty of them, and many still sit in our own collections. At House of Gog, we’ve also always been drawn to what lies beyond the familiar. Two collectors, one question House of Gog started in 2018 with two toy collectors and a question. Hugues had spent twenty years making statues and collectibles for some of the...

The studio, set for Goraxx Before Goraxx makes its way into a collector's hands, it has to earn its place in front of the camera. The photoshoot is where every detail, from Skinner's unmistakable linework to the colors and textures of the finished statue, finally gets its due. Benoît Levac photographed the official images of Goraxx, our first original art statue created in collaboration with Skinner. These behind-the-scenes shots show how that session came together. Most of these photos have never been shared before. An Old-School Photographer Benoît Levac has spent years behind the camera, working across commercial photography, product...

Goraxx, the monster maker, mid-summoning | The art of Skinner Skinner paints in color that refuses to sit still. Vivid and saturated, held together by dense, confident linework, his art draws from the '70s and '80s: old-school Dungeons & Dragons lore, Heavy Metal magazine, Jack Kirby and a lifelong love of monsters and dark magic. On a flat page, that color does all the work. On a statue, it has to hold up across volume, shadow and light falling on the form from every angle. Goraxx was our first Skinner piece, so we had to figure out how to make...

Klaw, the space ravager. Original art statue by Pascal Blanché Klaw's escape pod crashes on Derelict Planet. He walks out of the wreck, and something from the depths of the planet finds him. It gives him a gift: a surge of knowledge and power, and one of his hands transformed into a mutated claw. It is the moment Klaw's story turns, and two sides of the character emerge. The Dual Nature of Klaw Klaw in the regular configuration (left) and the Blademaster configuration (right) The mechanical hand is Klaw before the transformation. It belongs to the space ravager who survives...

Métal Hurlant no. 1, January 1975. Cover by Mœbius Picture a French newsstand in January 1975.Comics were still largely regarded as entertainment for children and teenagers. Science fiction had an even harder time finding cultural legitimacy. France had a long tradition of science fiction, but the genre was still widely treated as a minor form of popular culture rather than literature or art.Then something new appeared on the rack.Sixty-eight pages. Mostly black and white. A Mœbius cover. And a title that sounded like the future had suddenly developed a voice:Métal Hurlant. Screaming Metal.It wasn't simply another science-fiction magazine. It treated...

Most statue launch videos are pretty straightforward.Put the statue on a turntable. Light it nicely. Rotate it slowly. Show the box. Done. There's nothing wrong with that. We've made plenty of them since. Jaak was our second statue, and we were still deciding what a House of Gog launch video should be. She comes from Derelict Planet, and Pascal Blanché had already built an entire world around these characters. Putting her in front of a nice backdrop and calling it a day didn't feel like enough. We wanted to put her in the world. So we built part of it....