A look at 2023's Intern for a Day, G-con, and LeginsCon events!

Legionnaires from all over the world mark a very special event on their calendar each year – Mythic Weekend! A 4-day event that includes the private Intern for a Day experience at Four Horsemen Studios, the yearly live reveal special known as G-con, and then the 2-day party that is LegionsCon, Mythic Weekend has become the event of year for Legionnaires. In this recap, we will look at these 3 events and how they shaped the amazing experience that was Mythic Weekend 2023!

WARNING – this is a VERY picture heavy article! Big thanks to Cullun Culp for providing the images documenting this entire weekend!

Intern for a Day

This year was the 6th “Intern for a Day” - an event where we open the doors of Four Horsemen Studios to lucky Legionnaires who are selected via lottery to win a chance to purchase tickets for this private event. This year we welcomed our largest group of interns ever!

Intern for a Day begins as attendees file into the studio trying to keep their jaws from hitting the floor as prototypes, 2-Ups, statues, and Legions figures galore greet them – and this is before they have even made it through the vestibule!  

In the studio’s break room, a spread of bagels with cream cheese, assorted muffins, coffee and more await the interns as they prepare for their day. This is one of our favorite parts of the event - everyone is so excited to be there and seeing people who have only ever engaged online meet in person and immediately connect over their love of Legions is amazing!

After breakfast, all our interns are gathered together so that Jeremy can officially welcome them and explain the plan for the day. Interns are broken into 4 groups and sent off to one of our 4 special sessions we have for them, including:

• Sculpting demonstration with Eric Treadaway
• Painting demonstration with Cameron Smith or Sherri Lynn Cook
• The Art and Photography of Legions with Nate Baertsch and Trevor Williams
• A tour of our studio with Jim Preziosi

These hour-long sessions give our attendees insight into the process of creating Legions toys - from the sculpting of the new characters and parts, to the 3D-printing process, to painting prototypes, to the packaging and promotional photography that accompany our releases. Each session is unique and interactive, as attendee questions drive much of what is presented to each group!

Throughout the day, each group gets a shot at each session so no one misses out on any of the great content. Lunch is also provided (Jersey pizza!) and there are plenty of surprises awaiting interns during their visit. Two of the BIG surprises for this year were the life-size Cosmic Legions Thygar and Zeeri statues that made their debut at LegionsCon 2023!

Thygar was already done when attendees arrived, so they got their first look at this amazing creation. Later in the day, during their studio tour, interns got to see the Zeerian Spyre statue actually being worked on by our large props team of Bill Mancuso and Dan Diana, along with Alex and Juli Abene who created all the soft goods seen on Zeeri and Thygar.

Intern for a Day ends with two popular things - a pop-up shop where interns and their guests can buy a variety of Legions figures directly from the studio (without needing to wait in any lines!), and the group paint session of the surprise Intern bust! Every year we present interns with a handcast bust of a character that they can paint if they choose and take home as a reminder of their experience! This year’s bust was the first ever Cosmic Legions one we have done – Aius Cyppiteon!

The day ends with lots of tired interns who can’t seem to stop smiling! Yes the fun of intern is over, but they still have G-con and LegionsCon to look forward to - in fact, the "Intern for a Day" part continuned at the LegionsCon venue hotel!

Note: One of our attendees this year was Bigdub Squeezit. He documented his entire experience, including nearly all of Eric’s sculpting session for his group. You can watch his video of the experience here.

Below you will find a gallery of images from Intern for a Day, as well as some shots of the party at the LegionsCon hotel after the day's fun was over! Click any image to see a larger version.

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G-con: Rising Sons

Back in 2018, Four Horsemen Studios began bringing our friends to the studio and hosting a livestreamed reveal special for Legionnaires worldwide. We were apparently ahead of our time, since COVID pushed everyone to begin streaming content, but we were already doing it a few years before it become a necessity!

The G-con reveal special, which is indeed named after George Gaspar, was originally in the Summer, but in 2020, we paired the broadcast with the virtual LegionsCon for that year, starting a tradition that continues today in the form of Mythic Weekend!

For 2023, G-con was moved out of our studio for the first time and over to the LegionsCon venue hotel! This allowed us to welcome a much larger studio audience to the event, including our 2023 interns and lots of additional friends who helped make the reveal of the Mythic Legions: Rising Sons wave one to remember!

Rising Sons is the culmination of the first major Mythic Legions story arc, pitting the ragtag barbarians of the House of the Noble Bear against the mercenaries and assassins of the Sons of the Red Star! You can watch the entire 5-hour broadcast on our YouTube channel, but some of the highlights from this year’s G-con included:

• Diego coming out for the first reveal by blowing a battle horn and dressed in full Viking gear!
• Revealing the new “Exiles Under the Mountain” 2-pack set to some of the biggest dwarf fans in the community, and revealing that we had named a few characters after them!
• Honoring the “Legions Ladies” of our community with one of the coolest figures we’ve ever done – the frost elf Neve.
• Surprising Michael and Brad from Legions Lair with characters named after them, and further revealing that Emir Casparr is really Skapular the Cryptbreaker 2 in disguise!
• Getting to reveal Attlus the Conqueror 2, and then immediately following his reveal up by showing his mount – the massive bear known as Bodvar!
• Getting presented with a perfect replica of the Aetherblade sword by Paul and Jaime Sutt along with Walter Hagen!

For all the fun of G-con, there was a pretty big absence in the room, as our beloved Cornboy had to skip the event due to health concerns. He was definitely on all our minds and in all our hearts as everyone wished him a speedy recovery.

As G-con wrapped up for the day, the hotel was rocking with fans eager to see the prototypes on display and LegionsCon exhibitors beginning to arrive to set up their booths for what would be the biggest and best LegionsCon to date!

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LegionsCon 2023

What started as a small meet-up of Legions fans and customizers after ToyConNJ in 2019 has become an absolutely epic 2-day con that takes up an entire hotel in Whippany, New Jersey. This year’s show was held at the largest venue LegionsCon has ever had - and the Legionnaires filled every inch of that venue! From late night hangouts in the hotel lobbies, to the displays of Legions figures, prototypes, and life-size statues that seemed to be around every corner, to the event spaces packed with the most incredible community of creators, artists, and toy enthusiasts anywhere - LegionsCon is something special, and 2023 was incredible in every way!

As soon as guests got to the hallway area of the hotel where the con festivities were being held, they realized that everywhere they looked, there were Legions-focused displays to enjoy! From a hallway of “Welcome to LegionsCon banners”, to the aforementioned life-size Thygar, to displays cases with diorama displays for Cosmic Legions and Mythic Legions - the latter of which is where the figures revealed at the previous day’s G-con event were displayed! These exhibits were all in the event lobby, along with another display case where we surprised attendees with fine cut samples from the Mythic Legions: Necronominus wave!

Continuing deeper into the venue’s event area, we also had the Zeerian Spyre full-size statue on display, as well as the Cosmic Legions: OxKrewe campside diorama that we debuted earlier in the year at Power-con.

The actual LegionsCon exhibitors were split across two rooms – the main ballroom where the studio table and many of the artists and vendors for the show had their displays, and a second room across the hallway with some additional exhibitors who simply did not fit in the main ballroom. The overall space for LegionsCon’s exhibitors in 2023 was close to 14,000 sq. feet – which is about 2.5 times the size of the exhibitor space the show had in 2022!

As always, the artistry on display at LegionsCon was incredible. Jeremy often says that LegionsCon is “part toy show, part art exhibit, and part family reunion.” That is an accurate description of this event, which certainly features ton of amazing art, a great community of people, and lots and lots of toys for sale!

One of the toys for sale at LegionsCon 2023 was a surprise release - the Valiant Knight! LegionsCon attendees who made their way to our table at the start of the morning on Saturday saw a figure for sale that they had never seen before - a surprise reveal/release that uses the new knight parts that we debuted on the Necronominus wave! We had wanted to get those new parts with their added range of motion into fans’ hands as early as possible, and we came up with the idea to produce a brand new figure with those parts and release it as a surprise! Based on the reaction this figure received at the show, and the glowing reviews it has gotten since then, this plan seemed to be a good one indeed! (Note: for anyone who missed out at the show or was unable to attend, we will have more Valiant Knight figures for sale at StoreHorsemen in early 2024!).

Another highlight of LegionsCon 2024 for many was the cosplay of Simple Tricks and Nonsense. We had met John and Rebekah at ToyLanta earlier in the year, where they blew us away with their Deluxe Legion Builder costumes (Skeleton and Goblin). Those costumes made an appearance on Saturday, while a pair of new costumes – the Masque of the Red Death and Illythia, were brought out for Sunday!

Beyond the massive showroom of incredible items at LegionsCon, the show also ran a handful of “breakout sessions” on each day. On Saturday, Dorklair and Wolf King Customs sponsored a “Pop and Swap” session introducing attendees to how to break apart Legions figures to swap out pieces. They even had bins of loose parts available that attendees could dig through to swap out pieces with the figures which they had brought into the session!

On Sunday, Jeremy Girard and David Williams held a “Basics of Painting” session where they showed new painters the basics of drybrushing and adding small details to custom 3D-printed parts. The two of them even speed-painted a pair of customs during the session which they gave away to a few lucky attendees at the end of the session!

The final session of the weekend was Dennis Derby and Eric Miller covering more advanced painting topics like how to paint eyes, matching paint colors, tips for painting flesh and more. It was a rare opportunity to learn from two of the community’s most well-respected artists!

As the day wrapped up, the announcement was made that LegionsCon 2024 had already been scheduled and that it was returning to the same hotel for next year! This was met with lots of applause, as the hotel was simply wonderful! From the lobby areas that Legionnaires filled after hours, to the amazing Irish pub that was onsite, to the overall comfort level of the venue and hospitality of  everyone working at the hotel, we are thrilled to be back at the Hanover Marriott for next year!

NOTE: You can get more info on LegionsCon 2024 at www.LegionsCon.com

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In Closing

One of the comments we heard over the weekend was it was amazing how long it took for LegionsCon to arrive (tickets went on sale in January, nearly 10+ months before showtime), and yet it also seemed to come so fast! It also went by so fast! As everyone hung out one more time on Sunday night, there were certainly tears flowing as friends new and old said goodbye to each other and made plans to reconvene next year for another amazing Mythic Weekend. We hope we will see you in 2024 as we celebrate 25 Years of Four Horsemen Studios and the 10-year anniversary of Mythic Legions!

Couldn’t make it to Mythic Weekend 2023 and want to see a video recap? Our friend, Big Dub, was on hand for the entire experience and he recorded it all! You can watch his video here.

Published on 12.19.23

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