Alrighty folks, after a brief detour to Bishoujo Town last week, Marvel Monday is back to Legends and it’s time to kick off a brand new Wave! Well, a brand new, um… old wave. It’s the Space Knight Venom Wave and these figures can only be considered new because I haven’t opened them yet. In case you ever wondered, nine times out of ten I do actually wait to open figures until I’m ready to review them. As you can imagine, there’s quite a stack of unopened Legends boxes in the corner, not to mention a bunch of other things. I am soooooo far behind! Anywho, I’m kicking off this wave with Miles Morales, because I was particularly excited to get this figure, and because he’s long overdue.

I’ve got nothing new to say about the packaging, other then that Hasbro could have wrapped this figure in an old newspaper and I still would have forked over the cash for him. This is yet another Spider-Man themed wave, and I hope you’re not tired of them, because we’ve already had another one hit the pegs since and there’s no end in sight! On the subject of Miles Morales, it’s staggering to me that someone out there in Hollywood didn’t realize that they could have avoided the whole issue of reboot fatigue by putting Miles up on the big screen instead of another Peter Parker. It would have been perfect timing and it would have spared us those terrible Amazing Spider-Man films. But it all seemed to work out because Homecoming looks like it’s going to be excellent and it’s certainly paying respects to Ultimate Spider-Man in the way they Ganke’d Miles’ best friend for the movie. Eh? See what I did there. Spider-Puns! Ok, let’s look at the figure!

I wouldn’t have put it past Hasbro to deliver us Miles on the usual Spidey buck, but instead we got a smaller, more age appropriate build and I love it. I also love this costume design. It’s a more minimalist approach to Spidey 616’s duds, consisting of a nearly all black suit with the crimson deco only appearing on the arms, chest, back, and head. It’s clean, it’s simple, and the red looks striking against the black. I also really dig the way the Spider’s front legs on his back seem to morph into those shoulder stripes. This is one slick Spidey suit! The paint on my figure is overall quite good, with just a few minor stray red marks on what is otherwise pretty neat and sharp.

You get two heads with the figure: Masked and unmasked and both are excellent. The masked head features sculpting around the large white eyes and the web pattern just painted on. The unmasked head is just an all around great sculpt. They did a nice job capturing the comic art and I really like the little grin Miles is showing.

The articulation here is certainly solid enough, although it is missing the shoulder crunches that we have been getting with most Spider-Man Legends figures. Yes, I would have liked if those points were included, but I think it’s a worthy trade off for getting Miles on the smaller teenage buck. Why couldn’t we have both? I dunno. Budget? Either way, the articulation here is pretty standard stuff for Legends. The arms have rotating hinges in the shoulders and wrists, swivels in the biceps, and double hinges in the elbows. The legs are ball jointed at the hips, have swivels at the thighs and lower legs, and double hinges in the knees. The ankles have hinges and lateral rockers. There’s a swivel in the chest, and ab crunch hinge in the torso, and the neck is both hinged and ball jointed. The joints are solid and feel great, making it damn hard for me to put this figure down.

In terms of accessories, Miles comes with the usual passel of hands that we’ve been seeing in a lot of Legends Spidey releases. You get a pair of fists, a pair of thwippy hands, and a pair of hands with splayed fingers. It’s still amazing to me that Hasbro hasn’t cooked up some web accessories for these figures yet. I’d happily take an accessory pack priced at $20 with a crap load of different webs, but from what I hear accessory packs are usually death on the shelves. Then again, NECA has been releasing them for their Alien and Predator lines, and DC Collectibles for their DC Icons line. I know, those are both more collector-orientated companies, whereas Hasbro has to make the retailers happy in order to get space on the planograms. A con exclusive, on the other hand, would be cool. Just repack one of the million recent Spider-Man figures with a bunch of web accessories and slap forty bucks on it. If the webs are good, I’d buy it.

To those of you who are getting all Spidey’d out, all I can say is I’m sorry. I get it. But with the lasting popularity of Spider-Verse, a new Spider-Man flick on the horizon, and Hasbro’s natural inclination for variants, you pretty much have to expect that they’re going to milk that spider for everything its worth. I certainly don’t mind, especially when it gives us a character like Miles, who I’ve been hoping for almost all the way back to when the Legends rebooted. And that’s probably why I resisted the urge to review both Ultimate Spider-Man figures together. Yeah, I’m trying to get caught up, and doubling up figures helps me get there, but I just thought this dude deserved his own day in the spotlight. I’ll probably wind up pairing up Ultimate Peter Parker with the Build-A-Figure when I get to the end of the wave.