Seth Johnson was lead designer for many years on HeroClix, up until Topps disbanded Wizkids in 2008. This is part three of our three part interview with Seth. (view part I, part II)

The Le: Multiple Man an uncommon? What were you thinking?

Seth: I don't remember the exact reasons anymore, but I'm sure there were some at the time. He would have been a better Common, though. Of course, then we wouldn't have gotten the LE...

The Le: Were there any HeroClix figures "ready to go" that never made it into a set?

Seth: I can only think of one character that looked anything like a store-ready piece but never made it that far. Around the time of Sinister we did a promo variant of the black-suit Spider-Man figure based on "Spider" from the Weapon X team in Exiles (where Peter Parker merged with the Carnage symbiote). He got as far as our first pair of production samples, but never came out for one reason or another. I was given one of the samples as a gift, and the other is in the WizKids archives. As far as I know, that's the rarest HeroClix figure in existence.

There were a few other characters that got worked on to lesser stages but never finished, but not many. The sculptors worked on pretty tight schedules, and most times a sculpt that didn't get used in one set would be folded into a future set. There are only a few I can think of where that hadn't happened by the time I left WizKids, like a giant-scale Watcher that might have become an event dial at some point. The biggest bunch of unproduced sculpts were actually for the ToonClix game we worked on for years; the sculptors made a ton of great sculpts (and we made a great game!) but the game never made it out, unfortunately.

Of course, when it comes to dials, I did lots and lots of dials (probably a couple hundred at least) that never made it to sets--mainly because nobody ever asked me to make dials for Archer and Armstrong, or the Masked Marauder and Team America, or the Young Heroes, or Sherlock Holmes and Doc Savage. I just did them for fun while eating lunch or waiting for meetings to start.