The toy collecting community was thrown for a loop recently when Diamond Select Toys unveiled their upcoming Marvel Select figure of popular Spider-Man foe Venom. Instead of a decorative display base — a common accessory to most standard-sized Select figures — the 7-inch Venom will come with a variety of interchangeable parts to re-create several of the anti-hero’s more popular looks over the years.With 72 different display configurations, it’s the most versatile Select action figure ever made, and each combination of parts is a masterpiece in its own right. The sculptor behind the figure is frequent DST collaborator Jean St. Jean, and he took some time out of his busy sculpting schedule to talk to us about the method behind the madness.Jean St. Jean: Chuck (Terceira, director of DST) suggested the idea while were talking about what to do for a base, since we had done the debris base with the exploding symbiote for Anti-Venom. I like breaking outside the established format once in a while just to keep things fresh.JSJ: The tough part was deciding what iterations would all work off one body. The best solution was to do the classic body type, which was the really big wrestler-type body, really more of a style-guide Venom, if you compare him to Spidey as originally conceived. Then, as I always do, I make sure he relates to other MS figures and also fits with the range of MS figures I’ve done in terms of scale. So, again I refer to the books and see how he should look next to Anti-Venom. So I came up with two sets of normal hands (open and fists), huge transformed claws, thehead version with removable tongue, transforming Eddie Brock head, the Todd McFarlane-style head, and the attachable back enhancement for theversion with all the extra arms and heads.JSJ: I have a ton of stuff. The irony is it’s easier to go to the comic shop and wipe out a section of trades and graphic novels than sift through my collection for reference, and the internet isn’t always the most comprehensive resource. Plus I like to re-read a lot of the old stuff to get my head into the character again while I’m working on it, so that there’s a logic to my decisions that is directly drawn from canon material.JSJ: I’m really happy with the diversity and the way they all turned out, but for some reason I think my favorite is the simplest: the Todd McFarlane one. The bulbous head with the huge creepy grin really grabs me, and I don’t think its ever been rendered accurately.JSJ:The trickiest was how to make theversion work as an articulated accessory piece that was removable. It needed to look good on its own and not affect the other versions of the body when not assembled. Plus, I wanted it to be very functional.JSJ: As a lot of people know, I worked for Todd for almost 7 years, most of that as his head sculptor, so I’ve had pretty extensive experience interpreting his aesthetic. In general though, a comic drawing, as good as it may be, has to be interpreted to make it work as a 3-D sculpt. Also there are areas that, in my opinion, need to be enhanced to make the sculpture more interesting and that’s where I fill in the blanks with my own touches. Specifically on the symbiote clan, I’ve done Carnage as a statue and Anti-Venom as a figure, and I wanted to differentiate between all their textures when approaching the Eddie Brock Venom.JSJ: Articulation is always a case-by-case basis, but lately I’ve been squeezing in as much movement as possible. In this guy we actually switched gears a little, in that no one was really thrilled with the usual MS hip ball joint look, so we decided on the compound hinge which we had used extensively in our Battlestar Galactica figures and was recently used on the Avengers Movie Hulk by Gentle Giant.JSJ: Obviously, Carnage would be awesome to round out the symbiotes in action figure form with my spin on it, but I’d LOVE to do Iceman, we could do something really sick with him.