Well I said I might work in another comic based Halloween review before we hit the big day and here we are. This one is really out of left field, because I stopped collecting DC Direct figures back when the DC Icons line went out. But… I saw these pop up on sale a while back and I tossed them into my cart with some other stuff. They arrived, I cursed myself for buying stuff just because its cheap, and they got put in a closet at which point I promptly forgot about them. Until now! Suffice it to say, these are the only two figures from this line in my collection.

Wow is this a blast from the past! I was always a fan of the DC Direct packaging and the way it showed off the figures. In this case you got a partially white window box with top and bottom bands color coded to the character, so purple for Batgirl and blue for Supergirl. Sure, there’s a lot of wasted space in that packaging and there are no accessories or extras for either figure. But I think this presentation had such a clean and premium feel about. The photos on the side panels also made these look really nice on the shelf. I never read the DCeased comic, but then again I never read all of Marvel’s Zombies either. The whole concept appeals to me a lot more as action figures than it does as a story line for a comic. Let’s start with Supergirl!

This is a nice looking figure, but in case you can’t tell, this is just the regular Supergirl figure with a bit of bloody paint added to the body and a new head sculpt. It’s a little more interesting for me, since I never owned the regular release, but I think this would be a hard sell at full retail if I had owned the original. The costume is mostly painted on, with the only unique sculpting found in the skirt, cape, and feet. The colors are nice and vibrant, but the red paint on the upper thighs doesn’t match the red plastic used for the lower legs. The pleated skirt looks good and doesn’t hinder the hip movement too badly. In addition to some splotches of bloody paint there’s some dirt added to the back of the cape.

But hey, that new head sculpt sure is nice! Kara has a really vicious expression with exposed teeth and milky dead eyes. There are some deep gashes on her face which look appropriately gnarly and blood everywhere. It’s a really unsettling look on the character, since I attribute her to being so pure and kindhearted. Very well done.

Articulation on the figure is pretty good. The arms have rotating hinges in the shoulders, swivels in the biceps, double hinges in the elbows, and ball joints in the wrists. The hips are ball jointed, the knees are double hinged, there are swivels in the thighs, and you get hinges and lateral rockers in the ankles. There’s a ball joint under the chest and another in the neck. I’d say the lack of extra hands is really conspicuous, but I guess the graspy hands are good enough for Zombie posing. On to Batgirl!

Obviously this is the Burnside Batgirl, which is a design I’m rather fond of, even if I didn’t care much for the comic. Unlike Supergirl, this figure has a lot of unique sculpting all over. I dig the way the tunic ends just above her hips, and the way the cape folds over the front of her shoulders and has sculpted gold buttons holding it in place. The bat symbol is sculpted, the wrist bracers are sculpted, and the boots have some great detail in the laces. She also has a belt sculpted from a separate piece that’s worn by the figure. The black and purple looks nice with all the yellow tossed in. I love this costume and the figure pulls it off well. Like Supergirl, all the zombification in the body is just done with bloody paint splatters, but man I do really love the bloody fingers!

Once again, the new head sculpt is quality stuff and possibly even more disturbing than Kara’s. Here we get an open bloody mouth with some nice use of gloss to make it extra gross. There are some deep cuts on her face, her hair is sprouting through a hole in the top of the cowl, and her eyes have yellowed irises giving Babs a perfect cracked-out undead look. The paint on the cowl could have been a little cleaner as there’s quite a bit of black slop on here ear, but there’s so much going on with this portrait, it isn’t overtly obvious to me.

Articulation here is identical to what we saw with Kara and that’s a good thing because both figures are loads of fun to play with.

These are both very nice figures on their own, but DCD definitely took the cheap way out here. The new head sculpts are excellent and the blood splatter is well done, but it would have been nice to see some re-sculpting done to the costumes. Even if I had been collecting this line at the time, there’s no way I would have paid retail to get these undead variants. And to be perfectly honest, the only reason I bought these on clearance at $11 each was because I thought they would scale better with McFarlane’s DC Multiverse line, but they are way too small for that. As it is, these will be relegated to a DC-related figure Tote… dead and buried.