As promised, here’s the second half of our look at Mattel’s Crime Syndicate of Amerika 5-Pack. Last time we checked out the packaging and the excellent Johnny Quick and Power Ring figures. This time we round out the evil team with Superwoman, Owlman, and Ultraman.

Like Power Ring and Johnny Quick, Ultraman is mostly comprised of a standard DCUC male body with simple coloring to make up his costume, and a few extra bits here and there. The head sculpt on this guy is superb. It’s very detailed with just a tad of malevolance, and comes a close second to Johnny Quick as my favorite head sculpt in this batch. The body is cast entirely in blue and the only other coloring detail is the Ultraman emblem tampo’d on his chest. He also has these silver egg-like pods around his waist and a red, soft plastic cape. All in all, he’s a simple, but great looking figure. I think the cape would have looked better with the Ultraman emblem on it as well, but now I’m just nit picking.

Superwoman is based on a pretty standard DCUC female body with a simple, black, one-piece outfit and gloves and sculpted black boots. She also features a sculpted choker necklace and a dainty little black and yellow cape that hangs around her shoulders and is permanently pegged into the body just under her neck with a sculpted chain and shoulder pads. The head sculpt is very good, somewhat close to the old Wonder Woman figure, but with a much more stern expression. The sculpting on the hair is particularly well done, although it does inhibit the neck articulation a bit. I expected Superwoman to be a straight repaint and resculpt of the old Wonder Woman figure, but she certainly isn’t. In fact, she’s noticeably shorter and slighter of build than Wonder Woman and much closer in proportions to the more recent Star Sapphire WW.

Last up is Owlman and I’m guessing he may be the figure in this set people are most excited about, as he utilizes the most new sculpting of the set. Again, we have a pretty standard DCUC male body cast entirely in gray. He has sculpted bracers on his wrists and ankles and a nicely detailed utility belt. His segmented, soft plastic cape hangs down over his shoulders and he comes with a, what… owlrang? The owlrang is rubberbanded into his hand, and I haven’t bothered detatching it, because if I do, I’m sure I’m going to lose it. The head sculpt here is really good, although very oddly shaped thanks to his distinctive headgear. It looks like its impossible to have a regular human proportioned head under that thing, but I still like the way it looks. It does, however, seem to be based more on the character’s animated counterpart than his comic panels.

All three figures share the same points of articulation. You get ball jointed necks; The arms feature ball joints in the shoulders, swivel cuts in the biceps and wrists, and hinged elbows; The legs feature universal movement in the hips, swivels in the thighs, and hinged knees and ankles. The figures swivel at the waist and all feature the standard DCUC ab crunge hinge.

So, here’s the part about this set that a lot of collectors haven’t been too keen on. The last two of these 5-Packs (Gotham City and Green Lantern) sold for about $50-60. This one sells for about $75-80 and that price tag has been drawing it’s share of scorn. Personally, I’m not complaining. I wanted these figures for a long time now, and the set breaks down to $15 a figure, which is exactly what I wind up paying for most DCUC figures, unless I get a deal on a case. I do understand that collectors tend to associate these multi-packs with getting a bargain, but this one just isn’t one of those occasions. Either way I don’t see what the fuss is all about. Those cheaper sets were stuffed with a lot of straight re-packs, whereas this set very fresh. I couldn’t be happier with it.

The moment I heard that Mattel was doing a set of Crime Syndicate figures in the DCUC line, I was beside myself with joy. Then the news soon followed that it would be one of those Walmart exclusive 5-packs and my heart sank into my feet. I’m sure I’ve cried plenty of times here about how the Walmarts in my area all stopped carrying DC figures a long time ago, so the chances of me finding this set at retail were impossible. My only hope was that Walmart would offer the set for sale on the website like they did with the less spectacular Green Lantern 5-pack. Thankfully that hope paid off. The set went for sale online, and thanks to a tip from a friend and fellow collector, I was able to buy it before it quickly went out of stock. I’m going to break this up into two parts. Today we’ll start with a look at the packaging and two of the figures: Johnny Quick and Power Ring.

This is the first time I’ve purchased one of these 5-packs from the DC Universe Classics line, so the packaging is pretty new to me. The set basically comes in a huge tray-like window box with the familar DCUC deco that we’ve seen so many times on the carded figures and the 2-packs. Obviously it’s a pretty big package to hold the five DCUC scaled figures in a staggered layout. You get Superwoman, Owlman, Ultraman, Johnny Quick, and Power Ring, who are of course the evil alternate versions of Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, The Flash, and Green Lantern, respectively. Some of these figures are packed in action poses, so here’s hoping the joints didn’t get too messed up. The back panel of the box has bios for each character, along with a photo of the figure and a shot of their comic counterpart. Overall, I like the presentation here. I’m somewhat tempted to hang on to the box as it is fairly collector friendly, but since these figures are going right up on my DCUC shelves, I opted to pitch it. Good thing too, since Walmart slapped some huge, f’ugly product label on the bottom of the package.

Johnny Quick features a standard DCUC male body and relies mostly on coloring and paint apps to distinguish him. The head sculpt, however, is new, really fantastic, and much better than I expected to find in a set like this. The bulk of the body is cast in a nice rich, red plastic, whereas the boots and gloves are in yellow plastic. I’m really not a fan of this quality of yellow plastic used. It just looks waxy and inconsistant compared to the rest of the body. I much prefer the yellow paint used on the Barry Allen figure’s boots. On the upside, the paintwork on the figure is really sharp, particularly the lighting bolt pattern that runs up and down his torso.

Just like Johnny, Power Ring features the same standard male body. He’s cast in green plastic with painted white gloves and lighter green paint for the boots. He’s also got light green stripes running up his arms. The emblem on his chest is clean and sharp and the paintwork applied to his sculpted power ring is very nicely executed. Power Ring features an excellent head sculpt and looks mighty pissed off. The mask is actually part of the sculpt and painted over. There’s a wee bit of bleeding between the flesh paint and his mask, but nothing too bad at all. I’m guessing this head might have been reused from one of the DCUC Green Lantern themed waves, but I don’t have all of those figures, so I’m not entirely sure one way or the other.

Both figures feature the same standard DCUC articulation. The head is ball jointed; The arms feature ball jointed shoulders, swivels in the biceps and wrists, and hinged elbows; The legs feature universal movement in the hips, swivel cuts in the thighs, and hinged knees and elbows. The figures also swivel at the waist and have the hinged ab crunch in the torso.

So far, I’m extremely happy with the way this set turned out. While I didn’t hesitate at all to order it, I was a bit concerned about not being able to pick out a set with the best paintwork. Sometimes with sets like this you just need to pull the trigger and hope for the best, and based on the first two figures, everything seems fine. I’m still not all that keen on the yellow plastic used for Johnny Quick’s gloves and boots, but that’s really all I have to complain about here. Both of these guys were a little pre-posed in the package, but thankfully it didn’t do any harm to their joints. These are awesome looking figures.

Next time, I’ll wrap it up with a look at the last three figures in the set.