After a detour last week, I’m returning to the Tri-Sentinel Wave from Jonathan Hickman’s House of X! Today I’m opening up my fifth figure in the wave, leaving just two more to go before I can assemble my Tri-Sentinel. And while I didn’t intentionally plan it this way, all the remaining figures are ladies! So, let’s go ahead and open up Jean Grey, aka Marvel Girl!

Once again, I love the package design for this wave. The futuristic stylings of the X-Men logo, the clean black, white and red deco, and the character name printed on the front in the Krakoan language. Every once and a while I’m tempted to save the boxes for a wave and this is one of those times. But I’m not. Because, no room! Jean looks absolutely smashing amidst this presentation, and as we’ll soon see, I might have been better off leaving her in there.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is a fantastic looking figure. House of X sees Jean return to her classic Marvel Girl outfit, and I do dig me some classic X-Men costumes! Naturally, I was excited to get this figure and I was quite pleased with what I initially saw. While the soft plastic skirt is cast separately from the torso, it’s pretty damn convincing as being all one dress. And it’s a simple one at that, especially when you consider that every damn superhero costume these days are made out of colored basketball skins! The green is perfectly matches from the skirt to the upper body, and on to the sleeves. That simplicity is only broken up by the textured black belt with green belt loops, and an old school rectangular X-branded belt buckle. The yellow boots are painted on the legs, but some sculpting for the modest heels on the feet, while the yellow gauntlets have sculpted flares to give them that cool buccaneer style! Going strictly by looks, I love the way this costume turned out and the coloring on this figure is very striking!

The portrait is equally solid. The yellow mask appears to be sculpted separately and attached to the head sculpt, which gives it a lot of depth. The face is pretty, and they captured her flowing red hair particularly well. OK, the hair is more orange than red, but I think it adds to the overall coloring here nicely. The hair parts at each shoulder, and it hovers a bit to not inhibit the neck movement too badly. While Hasbro has been employing halftone printing for their faces lately, this one appears to be painted, but that’s fine because the paintwork is pretty sharp. I had to get in pretty close to notice any imperfections.

What could possibly drag down such a great looking figure? Terrible articulation! Despite having a bit of a slit running up the right side, the plastic skirt renders the leg articulation above the knees pretty much useless, and that really limits what you’re going to want to do with the knee and ankle articulation, other than make small adjustments to try to keep her standing. Unless you just want her flat out kneeling, those double hinges in the knees just aren’t going to help. The legs are also a bit rubbery, and mine were slightly warped out of the package.

The normal ball joint that we get under the chest in the female figures has been moved down to her waist, which feels weird all by itself. And finally, the elbows hardly allow for even a 90-degree range of movement. Tally all of this up and you get a recipe for a figure that is absolutely no fun to play around with. I’m doing full slits on each side of the skirt to free things up a bit, but I’m not sure yet. Look, I do understand that a lot of these problems are trade offs for the costume’s aesthetics, but it doesn’t change the fact that it makes for a rather boring figure.

As far as accessories go, Marvel Girl comes with two sets of hands: One pair of fists, and one pair of the old powers-slinging hands. She also comes with a Krakoan Flower, fresh from Mars or perhaps The Savage Land. It’s an excellent choice, since these flowers played such a major role in the book. The purple bulb comes sprouting out of a gray spherical flower pot. Jean can sort of hold it in her powers hands, but because there isn’t a lot of room for leg adjustments, she frequently wants to fall forward when carrying it. So, don’t ask her to be the Flower Girl at your wedding!

Wow, this was a quick in and out as far as reviews go, but truth be told there just isn’t a lot more that I can do with poor old Marvel Girl here. She looks outstanding on the shelf, and the fact that Hickman brought back the Marvel Girl costume gave Hasbro a great excuse to give us this classic costume in a figure. I would imagine that even collectors who aren’t a fan of the House of X series would want this figure for their display. It’s just too bad that articulation had to take such a hit here and there’s only so many pictures I can take of her standing straight and waving her arms about. Sure, I’m still happy to have her, but I wish she was more fun.