The Le: I'm a little lost. At what point did you start at Wizkids, and when did you leave?

Jason Mical: I left in March of 2006, almost three years to the day after I started. I started at the company the first week of April 2003.

The Le: Ah. Other than Spawn, were there other figures (that you know of) that were made but never made it into sets? I know you were involved with a Red Son figure... and what exactly is a "Paintmaster?"

Jason Mical: Wow, I'd forgotten about that Red Son figure until I saw Seth's picture, that's awesome. Because of the resources involved in sculpting figures and creating dials (and the production process if things went that far!) there weren't a lot of figures created that didn't make it into the game. The House of M Magneto was one, but that was just a matter of changing the figure to have fewer medals on his chest so he wasn't so clearly modeled on the art that ripped off the portrait of King Carlos.

I honestly can't think of any others off the top of my head, except for a non-HeroClix example: the Crimson Skies Zeppelin that was going to be a big figure at conventions if the game did well. It didn't, and it didn't. Supposedly the prototype was made of metal and extremely heavy. I never actually saw it, so I can't confirm that.

A Paintmaster is a figure that's created to show the painters in the factory an ideal of how it ought to look. They have extremely high levels of detail, like professionally painted wargame miniatures. Which I suppose is what they are. There's a picture of the IC Magneto paintmaster [to your right].

The Le: What did you always want to be when you were growing up? I can't imagine a child thinking to himself, "Gosh, when get bigger I want to be in PR!"

Jason Mical: Ha, no. It's like that video about 'When I grow up, I wanna be in advertising!' I went through all the usual stuff when I was young: astronaut, president, pilot, etc. By the time I went to college I had already started writing fiction and knew I wanted to get into English in some way; I thought being a teacher was a good idea, which was beaten out of my first semester of work experience. I remember thinking 'I spent four years wanting to get beyond high school, why would I want to go back?' I actually interned in the film industry and planned to get into directing and filmmaking, and ended up in New York after I graduated to get into magazine publishing. In retrospect, it's probably a very good thing that I didn't as more and more print media is dying off or no longer profitable.

Throughout it all I knew I wanted to do something with writing, and even if I couldn't be a best-selling novelist from the beginning then I wanted to use my writing skills in other ways. Moving into communications was a natural shift for me then. Part of the reason I was put into the PR position after the layoffs was that I had impressed the brass with my patience and genuine desire to help people on the forums, which I tried to implement in all parts of my job as PR guy. It's funny because the PR industry as a whole isn't used to doing that, it's much more the Mad Men stereotypical spin/manipulate/control, and I've never believed in doing that. Seth actually introduced me to some of the early digital PR pioneers like Jarvis, CC Chapman, and philosophy of communications like the Cluetrain Manifesto. It all kind of grew from there into my career now.

The Le: What other Wizkids games did you like?

Jason Mical: I enjoyed playing MechWarrior with REALLY big armies. Like, 3000 points or more. That was a blast. I never got into Mage Knight as a game but I loved the hell out of the fictional universe (in fact, some of the fiction on the old site was mine, although I'm not sure I ever got credit for it!)

Crimson Skies was drastically underrated as a game, although I think it should have been packaged differently. It's just such a great universe and the mechanics of the game were spectacular.

In terms of my favorite other WizKids game though it's definitely Pirates. I wrote a good deal of the card fiction for several of the expansions so I'm personally invested in it, but the mechanics were great and it just had a sheer joy and fun factor that is missing from a lot of miniatures games. It reminded me more of the Comic Fanboy games of HeroClix we played at the beginning, where having fun was more important than playing two Firelords and two Booster Golds, or whatever the cheese team of the week was.

Since I don't know where else I can say this I have to note that the NASCAR game had some of the best racing game mechanics ever, and it's a crying shame it didn't do better.