Few things shrink as drastically as a warship in this style. Battleships, aircraft carriers and liners of the stature of Titanic get a hull cropped to a handful of centimetres, while the funnels, bridge structure and gun turrets stay recognisably those of the real vessel. Submarines come out as pleasingly fat cigars.
The low part count keeps the build short enough for a child to finish in a sitting, and the result takes up no more room on a shelf than a mug – which is a real argument when the full-scale alternative is half a metre long.
These comic hulls sit beside aircraft, armour and figures in egg models and cute model kits. If the subject rather than the joke is what hooks you, the full-scale equivalents are in ship model kits, and the underwater side of the same story in submarine model kits, where hull seams replace funnels as the main job.
