It was waaaay back in April that I first dipped my toe in the pool of DC Super Hero Girls 6-inch figures with a look at Wonder Woman. At the time, these figures were impossible to find on the pegs, and going for crazy money online, so I was content with a one-and-done look at the line. Well, times have changed and these are now all over the place. A few weeks ago, I was able to pick up the rest of the initial assortment at a deep discount, so let’s take a look at a couple more today.
The packaging is bright and colorful and features some attractive character art on each card. They’re not collector friendly, but then these figures aren’t aimed at collectors. The bubbles do, however, give you a great look at the figures inside. The back of the cards features a little blurb about Super Hero High and the character. My only bone to pick here is the way they call out the cape and backpack as accessories. All that really does is just draw my attention to the fact that these two figures don’t come with any accessories. Let’s start with Supergirl…
Of all the Super Hero Girls, Kara’s look has changed the least from her more classic appearance. She’s still got her blue top with her S-shield, red skirt and red cape. The top features a white collar, which is a little evocative of a school uniform, she has a pair of high top red sneakers with painted white laces and tiny S-shields sculpted into them. She also has red and white wrist bracers. Apparently, one of Supergirl’s powers is to use her intensely bright red and yellow plastic to throw my camera’s light sensors for a loop, so please excuse the color balance on some of these shots. It was the best I could do. ARGGHH! The red is burning my retinas!!!
The “accessory” cape is removable, but I don’t see why anyone would want to. Also, the paint on her “sleeves” is a lot darker than her top. It seems like it should have been easy to make the blue match better. As it is, it looks like the one area of plastic was faded by sunlight. Other than that, I dig the costume a lot. It’s bright, colorful, and the paint applications are clean.
Supergirl has the typical young and cutesy head sculpt with blond hair and a blue head band. I’m getting a little Gwen Stacey vibe off of her. Hey, you got your Marvel in my DC! The paint for the eyes and lips is very clean and clear, but the plastic is really waxy and makes Kara look like she’s suffering from a Kryptonite induced flop sweat. Moving on to Batgirl…
Batgirl’s costume is a lot more original for this series, although I feel like there are some nods to the recent Batgirl of Burnside comic style. She’s got a purple top with a sculpted yellow bat symbol on her chest, black pants, and bright yellow boots, wrist bracers, and utility belt. The belt even features lots of sculpted pouches and a bat-shaped buckle. I really like the mix of colors on this figure a lot. And speaking of bat-shaped…
Batgirl also features a batpack. And yes, that’s just a backpack shaped like a bat. It’s held onto the figure with arm straps, and it seems to be removable if you work at it, but I wasn’t willing to try. Batgirl also has a bunch of copy stamped on her back and tush.
Batgirl’s hood is removable so you can get a better look at what’s going on under it. I like the head sculpt here a lot and once again, the eyes and lips are painted perfectly. She has a sort of domino mask, which is both sculpted and painted and she has bright orange hair.
The articulation on both girls is identical. You get rotating hinges in the shoulders, elbows, and knees, ball joints in the hips, and swivels in the wrists and ankles. Supergirl is is a lot more limited in her hip movement because of her cape. The articulation here seems fine for playing, but it’s lacking when it comes to getting many fun poses.
I’m not sure why, but I genuinely expected to dig these figures a lot more than I do. Yeah, that’s admittedly strange, since they’re toys aimed at little girls and not collectibles aimed at middle aged borderline alcoholics comic book geeks like me. I’m also surprised that DC couldn’t whip up a genuine animated series for this line, rather than the Flash-animation-looking webisodes that they went with. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate these figures for what they are and if I had daughters I’d be delighted to have them want to play with these, so long as they played with Transformers and GI Joe and Marvel Legends too! Another important factor to toss in is that these are 6-inch figures being sold at the ten dollar mark and that’s a rarity these days in any toy aisle. And since I got these at essentially half off, I went all in and I still have two more Super Hero Girls to check out, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn, and I just might do that on the next DC Friday.