Once upon a time, Victor Fernandez aka eclipseGrafx, started making custom figs. Pretty early on Jedi and Sith characters became common subject matter, needing custom lightsabers. (Duh.) Thanks to some craftiness, Victor built a name for himself making custom lightsaber hilts and unique staff designs for himself and the AFOL community…the Internet was a buzz. If you’ve been paying attention to the guy’s Flickr Stream lately, you’d know that, as hinted at by this post’s title, the custom world’s been rocked by a true “explosion of possibility”—the scale of which I’d say is of the end-of-Alderaan-by-Death-Star proportions. So what’s the big deal?

First off, Victor’s new printed pieces (eg the balaclava and camo heads above) open up whole new worlds of creative options given that they’re actually printed rather than decaled. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with decals, but printed-on pieces like these have a look that just can’t compare. I’ll have to wait to get my hands on these to find out for sure, but I assume these can handle a lot more wear and tear than decal jobs and probably look just as great as actual pieces from TLG. And since TLG hasn’t been able to give us some of the variety shown here, well someone had to do it.

Beyond these, there’s still the great lightsaber hilts. These only seem to keep improving as eclipseGrafx keeps churning them out. In addition to the custom hilts and staffs that were done in the past, there’s now a move to create some familiar looking pieces that bring us closer to the ones from that one sci-fi movie. (What’s that called again?) Case in point, there’s the M-hilt pictured above and this cool L-hilt. (Think hard, but don’t hurt yourself.) These things just get more detailed and offer a great level of variety to build not just awesome Jedi and Sith warriors but also other cool sci-fi, fantasy, or historical figs given just a little imagination and brick know-how.

In addition to these new developments, eclipseGrafx continues to offer some fantastic custom figs. Some take advantage of the new printing mentioned above, while some go the tried-and-true decal route. Either way, these are some pretty awesome figs, like the Insurgents, WW2 Medic, and the way-too-good Clone Commander Keller.

Granted, there are other folks out there printing pieces and selling cool figs, but what’s especially great about all of eclipseGrafx stuff is that they cut across themes that are pretty popular amongst TFOLs and AFOLs and could come in quite handy for all sorts of MOCs. Definitely check out the Flickr stream to see all the goodies that have been brewing. A lot of this stuff will be available at the upcoming Brickfête and Brickfair conventions as well as on the eclipseGrafx Bricklink store for an extremely limited time. (In some cases, until tomorrow.) Yup, my wallet just got $28 lighter.