While "Model Officer" was the title of my Star Wars: Empire #35, I'm using the phrase more literally this time. While I have dabbled with art now and again, it only took me a couple of attempts at sculpture to decide that my talents lay elsewhere. Leave it to those who can!

One who obviously can is Dayton Allen, a Florida commercial artist and hobbyist who has been keeping the Knights of the Old Republic comics team posted on his progress with rendering our favorite renegade Mandalorian, Rohlan, as a custom action figure.

Readers have seen a little more of Rohlan each issue lately – he's first seen in a cameo #6, heard in #7, and unmasked in #8. Dayton first showed us his take on a masked Rohlan figure a few weeks after #7 came out – and, following #8, he added new details for the character's face and backpack.

It's a hobby for Dayton — he's got more online at his site — and the work looks great to me. It was fun when my and Steve Ellis' design for Crimson Dynamo became a Heroclix figure; this is pretty cool, too!

"OK, I spent a lot of doggone money on this college education, and by God, I'm going to use every bit of it!"

That's how I feel sometimes, inserting little trivial tidbits into things -- not just from pop culture, but from that otherwise wasted education of mine. Thus far, I've tributed Melville in one of my Star Wars issues -- and with Knights of the Old Republic #8, now available, we hop around from the medieval Song of Roland to 18th-century ships of the line! (Click the link there to my production notes to see just how tortuously I'll trace a path to an inspiration!)

Not one of these things actually means anything, of course, except that, well, I had to sit through those classes (when I went), and this is the only way to get something out of them...