Poor Janet Van Dyne, it’s not enough that she gets slapped around by her husband, but she hasn’t been getting a lot of love from Hasbro either. I remember how pissed off I was that neither she nor Hank Pym were going to be in The Avengers film. Outrageous! How can you omit the two founding members? Of course, after basking in how awesome the movie turned out, I quickly forgot my haughty principles and shut the hell up. Wasp sort of got her due in the Avengers Assemble cartoon (it was a great portrayal), but then that got shit-canned. And now Ant-Man is getting a movie (assuming the production stops imploding) and she’s still left in the dust. Well, at least now she’s finally been represented in the action figure aisle, possibly for the first time since that Legends MODOK wave from the Toy Biz days. Unless, of course, you count the tiny wasp that came in the Secret Wars comic pack.
Here we see Wasp comes in the drab and joyless Marvel Infinite packaging. Blah. These cards are an opener’s dream come true because they’re so ugly I actually want to shred them to pieces to get the toy out.
This figure features Wasp in her most recent comic look and at 3 ¾” scale if you want to imagine she’s shrunk down, you can even consider this a 1:1 scale figure. Neat! Just like we saw last time with Ant-Man, Wasp makes use of a pretty standard buck and uses paint apps to make up her costume. She’s cast in black plastic and there’s a little bit of gold paint used for the deco on her torso and the soles of her boots. The gold looks nice next to the matte black of the rest of the costume. There’s some uneven application of the paint on her chest, but the rest of the deco is sharp and overall it still looks pretty good.
Of course, the other aspect of Wasp’s costume is her wings and I absolutely love the way Hasbro handled these. They actually come detached from the figure and make use of hinged pegs that fit snugly right into her back. Between rotating the pegs and working the hinges, you can get a pretty good range of poses out of them. The wings themselves are cast in a clear yellowish green plastic, which look great.
The portrait on this figure is among one of my favorite Marvel Universe headsculpts that Hasbro has turned out so far. It’s clearly defined and attractive with some very sharp paintwork on the eyes and lips. What really makes it work is the wonderful pixie-style hair sculpt. One look and there’s no mistaking it… that’s Janet! As Wasp uses one of the more modern female bucks, the figure delivers a good degree of articulation. The shoulders and elbows are pegged and hinges and the wrists have swivels. The legs are ball jointed at the hips, double-hinged at the knees and feature swivels in the thighs and lower legs. The ankles are hinged and have lateral rockers. There’s a ball joint just under her chest and the neck features both a hinge and a ball joint.
As with Ant-Man, Wasp comes with a tiny static version of herself. It’s pre-posed in flight with some basic paint apps and translucent wing parts. This piece is a tad bigger than the tiny Ant-Man and I’ve actually managed to not lose it. I dig that Hasbro includes these bonus items, but I really have no use for it and I can’t even think of a decent way to display it.
I’ve been waiting for Wasp to get her due in action figure form for a while now and I’m so happy to finally get her. This is a great little figure and it’d be really cool if we could see a repaint in her classic red and blue costume, which happens to be my favorite. I wish there were some way Hasbro could have worked a simple flight stand into the deal, but I can see where that would have been cost prohibitive. Still, I have to say, crappy package design aside, Marvel Infinites has been impressing me a lot so far, and I’ve only just started opening these!
FigureFan Zero 