Secret Convention Items: Batroc Daredevil

Every year hundreds of thousands of people go to comic book conventions and unknown to them, like the fast food joints they eat at while at the cons, there is a secret menu of items. This is Secret Convention Items.

Batroc Daredevil
Not the depressing lack of a beard and mask.

For those collectors who like less action in their figures, Marvel and DC have done a fairly good job of creating lines of higher class busts and maquette figures for the richer members of the fandom. Ranging from $20 plastic figures to $40,000 lifesize statues, this ability to bring in this shrine to the comic gods is quite hard to resist.
In particular the Bowen designed Mini-Busts stand out as a special object of desire and fascination creating figures of a myriad of characters from ones that people want to others that seem to be a waste of space. Along with all of these figures are the rare variants, hidden in box by some retailers to make the sale even better. Of course the rarest variants are the unofficial ones – messed up paint jobs, incorrect models and all of this variety of error which brings us to the object of this week’s Secret Convention Items – the Batroc Daredevil.
The Batroc Daredevil is essentially a Daredevil figure mistakenly (or purposefully depending on whom you ask) painted as Batroc the Leaper. The characters have little in common making the entire idea rather ridiculous and for the most part there is very little hate between the two to make the piece ironic.
As for the origins, it is hard to figure out if this was a custom piece that got in box or if this was yet another weird manufacturing error. Based on the fact that Batroc is a figure with arms and the telltale mustache and mask is gone, it gives validity toward the custom figure origin though it paint the picture that the customizer was extraordinarily lazy or making a weird point.
For now the only one in existence was picked up by accident by George’s Comic Hut, an outfit that commonly only exists at smaller conventions when the weather isn’t too bad in the Memphis, Tennessee area. Based on the last encounter the price of the bust is hovering somewhere around $800.00 or for a complete run of Devil Dinosaur in at least near mint.
Join us next week as we tell you about the Jack Kirby Civil Action Figure

Luke Herr

Luke is a writer and an aspiring professional comic writer who is also the editor in chief of Nerdcenaries. He currently is working on a graphic novel called Prison Spaceship.