UPDATE 11/8/2018: Sideshow’s Venom Life-Size Bust was the single thing that impressed me most at NYCC 2018, and just a month later, the 27.5″ tall Sideshow Venom LSB is up for PO! It’s both WAY WAY too big and WAY WAY too expensive for me to add to my collection, but is anyone planning to pick up what has to be among the coolest (and biggest) Venom items ever made?

ORIGINAL 10/14/2018: I can count on zero fingers the number of times that I’ve come back from a convention before being more impressed a life-size bust than anything else at the show—but I guess there really is a first time for everything!

While I had been looking forward to seeing Sideshow Collectibles’ She-Hulk and X-23 statues in person at NYCC 2018, what really ended up stealing the show was their jaw-dropping (and drooling!) Venom bust…

One of the first booths that I beelined to at New York Comic Con 2018 was the Sideshow Collectibles Booth, as I’d been anxiously anticipating checking out their upcoming She-Hulk statue with my own eyes.

But when I got to the booth, my eyes immediately were drawn away from She-Hulk (which is quite a feat—I love my Shulkie!) and to a case featuring a massive rotating display. It hadn’t registered it would be at the event at all, but the Life Size Venom Bust immediately caught all of my attention.

It’s hard to fully capture the size of this piece in photos, but believe me when I say that this Venom LSB is massive. It was far and away the largest Marvel item that Sideshow had on display at NYCC–which is saying quite a lot, given the number of 1/4 scale statues that were on-hand at the show.

But it takes more than size to impress me—and what this Venom Life-Size Bust has that genuinely blows my mind is an insane amount of detail. The level of sculpting on this piece is off-the-charts insane, and it just might be the single most incredible Marvel statue I’ve ever seen.

From the non-uniform teeth of varying shapes and sizes, to the slime oozing all over his mouth, to the nightmarish quality of the tongue—this is just sick. An outright awe-inspiring Bust if I’ve ever seen one.

All that gushing aside, I won’t be buying this Sideshow Collectibles Venom Life-Size Bust myself. Seeing the sheer scale of this behemoth in-person, I know that it’s not an item that I can successfully display or store in my own collection. It’s just too dang big and too different from my other collectibles.

Even so, I’m glad I saw this masterpiece in person, and I urge anyone who does collect Marvel statues of this type and size to check this out in-person if they have the opportunity: in my opinion, it really raises the bar as far as LSBs go.

The Sideshow Venom Life Size Bust should be up for order sometime this fall, and arrive in late 2019. There’s no MSRP for this monster sculpture of a monster, but I can’t imagine it being a penny under $995 based off of Sideshow’s previous Marvel bust prices.

Who else had the chance to see this Venom Sideshow Bust in person at NYCC, and what do you think of this beast? And for those who have only seen this sculpture via photos and videos so far—does Sideshow have your interest with this piece, or is this just not Symbiote statue for you for whatever reason?