Heroclix. Cheap Painted 1/48 Figures For Your Layout!

 Our Christmas O Gauge layout will be growing this year which is a golden opportunity to add more figures.   For a toy layout like ours, my favorite source for painted miniatures is Heroclix.    

Heroclix is a game that uses prepainted figures on moveable dials that track a character's abilities as they take damage.  Heroxlix have been produced for a HUGE variety of comic books and other IP and have deeply plumbed the depths of these meliu's so that there are alot of male and female figures of supporting characters and heroes in their cover identities, all dressed in suitably civilian clothing.

Heroclix are sold in blind packaging has been widely produced for over a decade so the second-hand market is packed with figures that are not desireable for gamers but are still nice, basic painted miniatures and very affordable.  No figure in this post cost more than 89 cents.  

Scale wise, most Heroclix measure between 32 and 36mm from sole of shoe to eyeline.  That translates almost exactly to 1/48 scale, albeit with slightly thicker proportions than actual human dimensions. There are exceptions to this size that you might want to avoid that are discussed near the end of this article.

Below is the selection of miniatures I purchased. All have been cut off their clix base and the integral base under their feet has been left on.  I highly recommend holding the clix base with a pliers and using a SHARP square chisel edge heavy exacto knife blade cutting downward onto a cutting board.  The round shape of the base and the varying degrees of attachment (some pop off easily some are darned hard) make it EXTREMELY easy to cut oneself if holding the figures in hand and/or using anything but the sharpest blade.

My preferred place to purchase used heroclix is Troll and Toad.  They have a hundreds of figures under a buck and low shipping costs for orders that contain only miniatures. I just went to Troll and Toad, selected " All Heroclix", checked the box to exclude out of stock items and sorted by price ascending.   Here's a link to that specific search.  Then I just added every civilian looking figure I could find until I had enough. None of these cost more than 89 cents.

Bigger pictures. Note that the figures are made of vinyl so if you have a different basing scheme or want to permanently afix your figures, it is very easy to remove the cast-on black base with a sharp X-Acto knife.

Neutral Suits

Black Suits.

Cops, Convict and a Miner.

Medical/Laboratory Professionals

Jackets and Trenchcoats.

Light Jackets

Business Casual

Average Joes

Businesswomen in skirts

More Office Women

Variety of Female Figures

Another mixed batch of Female figures.

Scale Issues. Note that the 2nd, 3rd adn 5th figures are massively taller than the others.  They measure about 40mm or larger from sole to eyeline putting them in a whole other scale range.  However they are also the best painted figures with some of the the crispest casting detail, so if you need some better painted figures for a foreground scene they might be worth looking at.  

All 3 of them -even the woman in black and red-came with some sort of scenic base (usually a bit of concrete sidewalk) attached to their feet rather than the black half-moon shaped bases that all the other figures have.  That scenic element seems to be the best way to tell which figures are in the larger scale.  When looking through the T&T listing pages I recommend avoiding all figures with a large scenic base element.

I didn't take the time to name every figure above, but here's the cards they came with if you want to look up the name of a specific figure

Lastly, what do you do with those extra clix bases once you've cut them off?  Here's what I did.  This is 5 bases (of the type with a round depression in the bottom) glued together with the top section popped off the top base(one the right side below) and another bottom base section glued to the bottom end (on the left below).

I haven't tested yet, but these should drop right into a standard Lionel Gondola and once given a coat of paint should be some nice industrial-looking cargo.

There you have it.  Cheap painted figures to populate your layout and some Gondola loads to boot!

Be well,

Karl