It’s Friday, and I’m in the middle of a delightful little four-day weekend, and I’m all kinds of excited to open up a brand new GI JOE figure! Yeah, it seems like FFZ is 90% Hasbro these days, but what can I tell ya? I talk about what I’m collecting, and that happens to be where a lot of the money is going these days. Today I’m cracking open the latest female addition to the JOE Team, and it is none other than Lady Jaye!

As always, the packaging here looks great, even if I constantly want to take a couple of colored sharpies and make the top bar after GI JOE red and the bottom one blue. But what can I say? GI JOE will always be the real AMERICAN hero to me. The character art on the package is excellent, but I feel like it’s a little understated here, but I don’t want to get all nit-picky. The box is collector friendly, but I got no room, so most of these packages go straight into the bin. I’ll note here that as a kid I didn’t get the original Lady Jaye figure until pretty late in the game. So when she was soaking up all of Scarlet’s screen time in the cartoon, it wasn’t until later that she would make it into my personal ranks. At that point I think I was mostly getting JOE’s to collect them rather than play with them.

Here’s Alison out of the package, and I’m digging her quite a bit. She is without a doubt one of the most traditional looking figures in this entire line so far. And by that I mean, she doesn’t have extra armor bits tacked onto her. Her outfit is comprised of some straight up green fatigues, high black combat boots, and black gloves. She’s got a brown double belt hanging on her waist, which has a sculpted pouch and a sheath for her combat knife, as well as a brown shoulder strap. The fatigues feature some nice texturing, reinforced pads on the fronts of her thighs, a blue shoulder patch, and a golden pin on the right side of her chest. Her sleeves are rolled up, her collar is popped, and the front of her fatigues are open pretty low. She is all around excellent!

I started off with Lady Jaye wearing her ball cap, which is a solid nod back to the original figure. It’s blue and features the GI JOE star emblem with the three trailing bars behind it, along with her short cropped hair peaking out from under. The head sculpt is a slam dunk. She’s pretty with a modest and confident smile. The eyes, eyebrows, and lips are printed on, and other than a wee bit of mold flashing along the jawline and ears, I have no complaints. Now, we’ve seen a few removable hats in this line, but Lady Jaye’s does things a little differently.

The hair is actually part of the hat, which all comes off at once, which can be a little unsettling the first time you see it. It’s a creative way to give Lady Jaye the option of going hatless without having to include an entirely separate head. Instead, you just pop off the hat piece and put on her hair piece.

Both the hat and hair stay on very well, and I think the hair sculpt is a pretty good likeness to her Sunbow design. As I said earlier, I have more experience with Lady Jaye from the cartoon than I do with the figure, so I’ll likely display her most of the time without the hat. But that’s not to say I don’t like the way it looks on her, and I try to switch it in and out throughout the rest of the photos.

Moving on to accessories, Lady Jaye comes with a backpack that performs a few functions. For starters, it has an articulated camera on one side, which is a modern update to the camera that came with the original figure. It’s a cool idea and a creative update, but it looks a bit awkward and cumbersome to me, so I tend to leave it down at the side. Besides, you can’t have it recording when you’re shooting Cobra troopers in the knees in order to get classified information off of them. Or forcing Cobra scientists to drink their own diabolical concoctions to wash down a meal-sized serving of piping hot justice. General Hawk doesn’t want to see or know anything about any of that shit!

There’s a clip on the other side to hold one of Lady Jaye’s trademark javelins. Yup, it only holds one, but you actually get two with the figure. Would I rather have had another javelin clip on the other side instead of that camera? Eh, maybe. Either way, I’m not too upset over it. Anyway, the pack itself has some very nice sculpted detail, featuring texturing, straps, and extra pouches. There’s also a carry loop on top.

Take it off and flip it around, and you get compartments to store two javelin heads inside, and that is a very awesome little feature indeed! I have had a few issues with some of the backpacks in this line staying put, but Lady Jaye’s pegs in pretty firmly and doesn’t fall out.

So, you get two javelins and three interchangeable tips: Two with blades, and one with a grenade. These are all pretty simple, but they work just fine. Didn’t she have some kind of magically telescoping one that she used to pole-vault over chasms in the cartoon? Well, if she did, it isn’t included here.

What you do get is a gun for launching them, and that’s pretty cool! It’s a wonderful update to the gun that came with the original figure.

And last, and very probably least, she comes with a little combat knife that fits into the sheath on her belt. It’s nothing to get excited about, but at the same time I don’t want to diminish it. Knives are great extras… especially when you’ve thrown or shot your only two javelins! The knife is all black, which makes sense to keep it from flashing during those night ops, and it also saves Hasbro the money of having to paint the blade. I may do mine up with a silver Sharpie.

While I’ve enjoyed just about all of the designs in this line to some degree, Lady Jaye is just so refreshingly loyal to her original design. Despite not having a huge connection with the original figure, I’m really thrilled to have this version in my collection. She looks great and Hasbro put some thoughtful touches into her weapons and gear. Now, I know the next obvious choice for a Femme-JOE is going to be Cover Girl, but I’m really hoping Hasbro decides to give us a Classified version of Bombstrike. She was easily one of my favorite figures from the Valor Vs Venom line, and I think she’s overdue for another update.