MAD's "RIOT" Kidrobot mascot release and signing

What's been in the works for almost 3 years now, has recently been revealed by Kidrobot as they have announced that their Kidrobot mascot #19 was done by Kansas City based artist Jeremy Madl aka MAD. If you follow MAD's work at all you have probably seen illustrations of this figure in one form or another, whether it's a dumbed down illustrated version of the KR mascot, or a Dunny in Riot gear, he has been tooling with this "Riot" idea for some time now. Along with the release, which is Thursday, May 12th, MAD will be doing a signing tour where he will be hitting up KRLA on the 12th, KRSF on the 13th, and KRMIA on the 14th where you can come out and meet the man behind the 'riot' mask :-) to get your figure signed! Jeremy also just posted up some cool photos via his flickr, along with some descriptions of what they are... and below I compiled them for your viewing pleasure.

Above you can see a rough sketch (click to make BIG) that MAD did to originally concept out this figure, and he proceeded to build the entire vector art from this. According to MAD: "The MAD RIOT x Kidrobot Figure Concept (turnarounds on the left) is the original concept submitted back in 2008 for the riot. At the time it wasn't even slated with a "number" so had to keep it open. I submitted this with 2-3 other ideas as well, but no idea if those will ever see the store shelves." MAD also mentions "RIOT x Kidrobot Figure Artwork... Pretty much the final product (turnarounds on the right) ...though the shield now has the badge embossed on it now!" As you can see the only really BIG diffrence btween the two is the exclusion of the gas mask... but all in all this thing turned out pretty freaking fantastic, and I love all the additional parts to this figure that KR agreed to include... that shield and helmet are seriously cool! So what are your thoughts, are you planning on picking this up?