I humbly beg your collective pardons if you’re getting overloaded with my features on DC figures. It wasn’t my intention, but as always FigureFan is about what I’m buying and Mattel’s DC License has been getting a lot of my dollars lately. I begrudginly started watching Young Justice back when it first aired and much to my surprise, I quickly fell in love with it. The animation is amazing, and the rest is a charming mix of great action and really cheesy fun. I’m also pretty happy that the elder Superheroes play a fairly big role in the show. Still, I was really on the fence over whether to collect the 4-inch line. As we’ll soon find out, they aren’t exactly amazing examples of action figure craftsmanship, nor are they anything even close to resembling a good value, but in the end two things won me over. 1) My enduring affection for the Infinite Heroes/JLU line and 2) The Collect & Connect Hall of Justice. Ok, enough rationalizing, let’s look at the first two figures.

The figures come on a simple bubble and cardback. I like the deco used here, which is obviously heavily influenced by the Infinte Heroes line. You can see all the main characters illustrated on the cardback, and yes that includes the two chicks (Artemis and Miss Martian) who apparently won’t be included in the initial planned run of 12 figures. Huh? Anyway, the packaging is deceptively simple as it features a concealed compartment behind the figure that holds the included piece to the Hall of Justice. The back of the card shows off an illustration of the character, a short blurb about the character, illustrations of the 12 figures planned out over three waves. You also get a printed card that shows you all the pieces for the HoJ and how to snap the whole thing together.

Aqualad looks pretty good. He’s well proportioned and the head sculpt is quite faithful to his animated counterpart. There isn’t a whole lot of sculpted detail on the body, apart from his hands and bare feet. He is wearing his backpack, with the hilt to one of his aqua swords in place, the other one is missing as the other sword comes as an actual accessory. Like all the Young Justice 4-inch figures, Aqualad feels like a mix of Infinite Heroes and JLU. You get the slightly more detailed sculpts of IH and the bare minimum 5-points of articulation that was standard for JLU. Unfortunately, these guys are two big to be in scale with the Inifinte Heroes figures, and designed too differently to be at home with the JLU figures.

With little in the way of sculpted detail on his body, Aqualad uses paintwork to make up his costume, which includes the blue water/energy tendrils that wrap around his arms. Overall the paint is pretty good, particularly on the face. There isn’t the usual slop and bleeding here that I found on a number of my JLU and IH figures.

As mentioned, Aqualad comes with one unsheathed aqua sword. It’s a decent enough accessory complete with a translucent blade, but Aqualad can’t really hold it very well, and when he does it’s just off to the side and not in a good action stance. He looks great standing there, but don’t expect to get any great action poses out of him, as he does just have the five points of articulation. At least his head is ball jointed.

Next up is the only villain of this initial wave: Icicle Jr. I can’t for the life of me remember seeing the episode he appeared in, so I can’t really compare him to his animated counterpart. He is, however, a pretty cool looking figure. His arms gradually turn into semi-translucent ice claws toward the ends, which makes for a really nice effect. The head sculpt is excellent as is the paintwork on the head. From the neck down, there isn’t a lot of coloring on the figure and apart from his arms and bare feet, there isn’t a lot of detail in the sculpt. Icicle Jr. doesn’t come with any accessories.

One major annoyance is that neither of these figures want to stand up on their own and they don’t come with figure stands. Luckily they work pretty well with the huge sack of generic action figure stands I keep on hand.

The pair of Hall of Justice pieces aren’t worth much at this point, so I’m going to hold off until tomorrow’s look at Speedy and Kid Flash to show what you get when you’ve completed the first wave of four figures.

Wait… How much do they cost??? Yeah. The good news is that if you’re used to hunting JLU figures, then you’re probably used to paying $10 for very simple and poorly articulated figures. And that’s exactly what you pay for these guys if you can find them on the pegs. If you’re forced to go online, some of them are going to cost a lot more, and that’s a tough sell since $10 a pop is a pretty hard pill to swallow for this line as it is. I was able to find all of the first wave at TRU, and I ordered three out of the four figures in wave two for the same price. But right now the only way for me to get Black Canary is to pay double for her. Now, I’ll concede that some of the price of admission is going toward the HoJ piece, but unless you’re buying every single figure in the line (all 12 of them, including two repaints) that’s going to be small consolation.

I like these figures, I really do. They really capture the spirit of the cartoon very nicely and there’s something oddly satisfying about their simplicity. But when it comes to complexity of sculpt and accessories and articulation, these guys fall so far behind other figures lines in this scale it makes the price tag seem like a real rip-off. Think about it. Ban Dai sells their new 4-inch Thundercats for $7.99 and Hasbro retails their current at or below that same price. Bottom line, you need to be a certain kind of dedicated collector and/or unabashed DC whore to collect this line. But then the unbelievably awesome C&C Hall of Justice backdrop doesn’t hurt either.