If you stopped by last Friday only to find no new content, I offer my apologies. It was a busy work week, which flowed right into a working weekend. But now it’s Monday and I have a couple of days off to spend some time opening some toys! And it’s one of those Marvel Mondays, where I can sit back, have a pour of Jameson, light up a fine cigar, and reap the rewards of having dutifully purchased all the little plastic people in a Marvel Legends Wave. Sure, I was going to buy them anyway, but now I can finally assemble the Build-A-Figure, and in this case, it’s a three-headed mutant-hunting robot freak! Let’s take a look at the Tri-Sentinel!

While this guy’s design is a tad unconventional, he’s not all that different from most BAFs. You get a torso, four limbs, but in this case three heads instead of one. And yet with a total of eight pieces, they still stiffed Wolverine and gave him BAF parts at all! Tri-Sentinel goes together just fine right up until I got to those heads and then things turned into a nightmare for my pour thumbies. The heads are on ball joints and getting them into the sockets required a nightmare or pressure. At one point, I thought the problem was that each head was designed for a specific socket, but nope, I just wasn’t pressing hard enough. You’d think with all the video games I play, my calloused thumbs would have been better suited to the task, but apparently they are still soft and delicate. Anywho… As you may have already surmised, this isn’t Loki’s Tri-Sentinel, but rather the Theta Sentinel. Why’d they change the name? Who the hell knows! I’m pretty sure, this guy is original to the House of X/Power of X stories. At the very least I can say that it’s the first time I encountered the design.

And what a slick design this is! Like most technology (except for maybe televisions), Sentinel tech seems to get smaller as it gets more advanced. And while Theta Sentinel has some significant height on most regular Legends figures, it isn’t the towering, bulky arsenal-type Sentinels of old. Quite the contrary, this fellow has almost organic in his curves, and he’s super lanky in the limbs. I love me some spindly robots, because it just makes them creepier and more realistic when you know there’s no way it could be a guy in a suit. Unless it’s Doug Jones. I’m pretty sure that guy could fit into anything. This Sentinel does have some bulk in the upper torso, and those flared shoulders give him an aggressively stylish look. I also dig how the upper body tapers to such a narrow connection to his hips. He’s also got some seriously long claw-like hands, which are intimidating enough to make Lady Deathstrike take a second look!

I absolutely love the deco on this guy. The metallic purple and silver contrasts nicely with the matte black. It’s only a little bit reminiscent of the old Sentinels. Maybe just enough to get a whif of familiarity, while still looking new and fresh. It looks like all the paint lines are incorporated into the sculpt, which is always a good thing. Otherwise, there aren’t a lot of panel lines or other busy details in the Sentinel’s armor, which serves to drive home its advanced futuristic look.

The three heads are damn creepy, with what I can only describe as techno-skulls for faces. All three faces are identical with elongated mouth pieces and narrow, angry red eyes. Their heads are capped off with what could be considered a more stylized version of the old Sentinel caps. The heads all connect to an exposed area of the upper body, which is sculpted with some really nice detail, giving us a glimpse at the mechanisms under the purple armor. Ironically, as difficult as it was to get the heads in, they tend to pull out when I try to manipulate them. As a result, I find the ball joints they connect with to be too frustrating to use as a point of articulation. Instead, I tend to just turn the head where it connects to the stalk. It’s serviceable, but also a shame that I can’t get much use out of the ball joints.

And speaking of articulation, despite his rather unique design, Theta Sentinel has most of the usual points. You get rotating hinges in the shoulders, elbows, and wrists. There’s a swivel in his waist. His legs have rotating hinges in the hips, double hinges in the knees, swivels in the thighs, and both hinges and lateral rockers in the ankles. He’s pretty nimble, and while it can take a little practice to get him to stand, he’s actually a bit better balanced than I expected him to be.

As far as Build-A-Figures go, this one was a real treat to finally get together. I kind of wish Hasbro released this figure as a Deluxe, because I wouldn’t mind having a couple more of them. Sure, we’ve seen Hasbro re-release BAFs as single packaged figures before, but somehow I doubt that’ll be the case with this one, so I’ll just be happy with the one I have for now.

And that wraps up this wave! It took me a while to get through it, but was worth it in the end. It was actually fun to be able to review some Legends that were based on a fairly modern book that I actually read for a change. As much as I can’t stand the direction Marvel has taken these days, Hickman will always bring me back to the fold. And this was a damn solid wave of figures. Indeed, the only one in the batch that I would consider a letdown is Marvel Girl, and that’s just because of her restricted leg articulation, which not only makes her no fun to play with, but she really can’t even stand up without looking awkward. And that’s a shame, because the sculpt and colors are pretty tight. I may be starting a new wave next Monday, or I may be detouring to check out something of the Hot Toys variety. We’ll see how much time I have on my hands, between now and then!

After some Marvel Monday meanderings, I’m finally down to opening the last figure in the House of X inspired Legends wave, and I saved the figure I since I was most excited for: Omega Sentinel! So, let’s check out Karima Shapandar…

I caught myself almost referring to Karima as a recent character, but holy shit, it’s been 21 years since she was introduced in the pages of X-Men Unlimited. God damn, I’m so old! One of the things that always fascinates and terrifies me is the blending of body horror and cybernetics, so it should be no surprise that I find her to be a compelling character, with lots of opportunity to explore the lines that divide human and machine.

And it doesn’t hurt that she just looks do damn cool! The towering robotic hunters have given way to compact elegance in Karima’s poetic female form! Omega Sentinel sports a form-fitting white and red suit with black trim, which gives a telling nod to the colors used to brand this wave’s packaging. Given the arms, I expected to get some fresh and original sculpting on this figure, but I was surprised to see that the entire figure appears to be new, which makes up for the fact that a number of releases in this assortment were done on the cheap with paint and recycled parts. In this case, every last detail in the paint on the figure is also reflected in the sculpt. That combined with the coloring makes this figure really pop!

While most of the body is all woman, Omega Sentinel’s technological side mostly manifests in her shoulder, arms, and neck, as well as the two plugs that appear down her front. I like the dark gray plastic, Hasbro used for the arms, you get some more black trim around the shoulder pieces, and some red paint hits on the shoulder nodules.

Omega Sentinel includes two portraits, but the one that comes on the figure is the synthetic head that reflects her appearance in the House of X. Hasbro did a beautiful job with this one, using more of that snappy red paint for the majority of the head. She has white panels, which are also part of the sculpt, and her eyes and eyebrows are painted with some crisp applications. It’s a great likeness to the character’s appearance in the comic panels.

The alternate and more human head is an absolutely amazing sculpt, and from a design standpoint I love it. She has a gray mask partially covering her face, but leaving the mouth and chin exposed, while a mane of wild hair splays out in all directions. Unfortunately, as great as it looks, this portrait is also a bafflingly huge missed opportunity to give us something comic accurate for the character. I don’t know why Hasbro chose to go with this rather specific look, nor can I comprehend the choice of skin and hair coloring, but it’s a shame they didn’t go with something more… correct? I’ve poked around a bit to see if I could come up with any answers as to what happened here, but I had no luck.

For the most part, the articulation here is pretty normal stuff. The legs are ball jointed at the hips, have swivels in the thighs, double-hinges in the knees, and hinges and lateral rockers in the ankles. There’s a ball joint under the chest, which is standard for the female Legends, but this was an example where I really missed having a waist swivel. Maybe it was because I had a hard time putting her down and just kept playing with her. The neck is ball jointed and hinged, and offers a nice range of motion for either head. The big change here comes in the arms, and that’s because you can swap out Omega Sentinel’s fore arms for weapons. The shoulders and wrists have the usual rotating hinges, but the elbows are hinged pins, so you can pull the arms out at the elbows and replace them.

I don’t know what either of these weapons are supposed to be, but let’s just go with some kind of focused energy beam emitters. One has some paint apps to make it look like it has glowing bits, while the other is just a giant maw. You can use either weapon for either arm, or just double her up for extra firepower! It’s a great gimmick and it really adds to the fun factor of this figure!

Coming into this wave, I was excited to get Omega Sentinel and now that I have her in hand, I’m very pleased with how she turned out. Yes, I’d still say that Hasbro needs to serve up an apology head at some point down the road. Hell, I wouldn’t mind a re-release, because there’s nothing wrong with having extra Sentinels. It’s a shame, because they really did do a nice sculpt for that portrait, I just don’t know what they were going for when they colored it. It doesn’t really detract from the base figure, and I still love this one a lot. Next week, I’ll put this wave to bed with a look at the Tri-Sentinel!

After meandering around a bit for the past few Marvel Mondays, I guess it’s time to swing back to my unfinished business with the Tri-Sentinel Wave! There’s just two more figures, and today I’m going with Dr. Moira McTaggert!

I’ve said my piece about the packaging for this wave over and over again, so let’s just say I dig it a lot and leave it at that. Moira seems to have been a polarizing character in House of X, thanks to some major (and heavily Hickmanesque) retconning. I actually had a pretty spirited discussion with one of my co-workers over it. It was admittedly weird to see such a major reassessment of a comic character that’s been around almost as long as I’ve been alive, but in the end I was pretty cool with it. It certainly wasn’t done out of hand, it was a major push forward in the X-Men story as a whole, and it’ll be interesting to see where it goes, assuming she ever decides to leave No-Place. Thanks to two sets of arms and two heads, you get a couple of display options, but let’s start with how she comes out of the box.

Dr. Moira, as lab-coated geneticist looks pretty good. She’s sporting a violet sweater with a maroon skirt and shoes. The coat is molded in soft plastic like a vest, with the sleeves sculpted onto the arms. It’s an old Hasbro trick and it works great, even if you can see the gaps in the shoulder holes in certain poses. Like any good nerd doing The Science, she has her coat pocket well stocked with pens. She also comes with two sets of hands. One is a pair of fists, the other features a right hand with the fingers splayed, which I believe is the usual powers-casting hand, and another to hold her accessory.

The scientist head sculpt is OK, but it’s definitely the lesser of the two. I don’t want to pick on the glasses too much, because it’s really tough to get those right in this scale. These don’t look too bad, but the paint on the frames is a little sloppy around the lenses. They also kind of look like Coke-Bottle Glasses, which makes this portrait unintentionally funny looking to me. But my biggest gripe here is that the painted lipstick does not match the mouth. Moira’s mouth was clearly sculpted with a dour, down-turned expression, while the lips are just painted straight on. It just doesn’t look good.

There are no surprises when it comes to articulation. Despite having swap-out arms, all the points function normally. I am happy to report that Moira’s skirt does not inhibit her articulation nearly as badly as Marvel Girl’s did. It feels like it’s made out of a softer plastic, and there’s a generous slit running up the right side. Not that I need Dr. Moira to be doing anything crazy, other than holding her Genetics Book, which is the only accessory she comes with. To change up Moira’s look, you basically pull out her arms to remove the lab coat and replace them with her sweater arms. Then you pop off the bespectacled head sculpt, put on her neckerchief, and pop on the second head. I should note that it’s really hard to pull the lab coat arms out of my figure.

So yeah, Casual Moira ditches the lab coat in favor of the white neckerchief and fashionable hat. Overall, I do like this version of the figure better, but I think a lot of that has to do with this second head sculpt.

The glasses are gone, the lipstick still doesn’t quite match the mouth, but I still think it’s a huge improvement. It’s like in those dopey comedies when the unpopular girl is obviously just a really attractive actress wearing glasses and has her hair up, only to have her get a makeover, which just involves taking off her glasses and letting her hair down. The hat could have used a bit more detail, but it’s fine.

Moira may not be the most exciting release around, but her Marvel Legends figure is long overdue. I really dig the extra effort they put into her. I mean, it’s only fair that a woman with an untold number of lives should at least get two display options for her action figure. And you can always pick up a second for Pyro to light on fire. That brings me to just one more figure in the wave before the BAF! So, next week I’ll wrap things up with Omega Sentinel!

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.

That’s right… Welcome to Marvel Monday on a Wednesday! As I’m fond of pointing out in some of my Marvel Legends reviews, I stopped being a regular reader of Marvel Comics a while back when they decided to stop focusing on things like decent art, good stories, and respect for established characters. As always, there are exceptions to the rule, and I did poke my head in a couple years back to read Jonathan Hickman’s House of X because… well it was Jonathan Hickman and the art looked pretty good. I enjoyed it enough to eventually pick up the collected hardcover edition, and naturally I was pretty thrilled to see the book getting a full wave of Legends. Enough so that I pre-ordered this one, instead of hunting them down individually. So here we go, embarking on this wave with the two heavy hitters first… Magneto and Xavier!

House of X is full of all the standard Hickman-isms that I’ve grown to love. You get high concept stuff about evolution, the rise and fall of empires, secret knowledge, time travel, and lots of great nuggets of world-building, sometimes leaked between the pages of the actual story. I get that some people don’t dig his style of story telling, but I do. It keeps me invested in the story and getting the most out of it means my reading has to be less passive and more aggressive. The package branding looks great and even includes the characters’ name scrawled in the Krakoan language! I really wanted to keep these boxes, but in the end, space is too much of a limited commodity around here so into the bin they went! Let’s start with Professor X…

Cards on the table, Xavier’s appearance creeped me the hell out in this story. He’s out of his wheelchair sporting a lanky body in a tight body suit with the latest version of Cerebro worn pretty much all the time and covering most of his head. The combination of lanky body and giant head piece makes him look like some kind of cyborg-meat-lollypop and I just find it unsettling. And yeah, considering what Xavier gets up to in this book, that’s probably exactly what the look was going for. And while this figure conveys that look pretty well, it also means there’s really not a lot to it at all. From the neck down you get a completely generic black buck with no paint apps or detail at all.

At least they used one of the more articulated bodies, complete with those lateral crunches in the shoulders. You also get an extra pair of gesturing hands: One regular pointing hand and one “I’m pointing at my head because I’m concentrating” hand. On the downside, the joints on my figure are extremely soft and gummy, especially in the knees. It took me a bit of time to straighten them out enough so he would stand.

And while Hasbro banked a ton of time and effort on the body sculpt, the Cerebro head sculpt is quite excellent! The bulbous silver head piece includes a mess of wires and gizmos on the back, and a giant blue X-branded visor on the front.

You also get a head without Cerebro and with some psionic effects radiating from Xavier’s head. It’s a nice bonus to add some value, but it doesn’t do a lot for me. Ultimately, this figure accomplishes what it needs to do, but unless you’re a big fan of this story, I’m not sure it’s going to be worthy of a pick up. Sure, Cerebro looks awesome, but the rest of the figure is so drab and generic. I’m happy to have it, but I’m curious to see if it’ll be a peg-warmer around these parts. Moving on to Magneto…

Unlike Professor X, Magneto retains a lot of his classic costume design in this story, but he trades in his darker colors for a white-and-black outfit. And just as Xavier saved Hasbro the cost of a lot of new sculpting, much of Magneto here is just a repaint. I was, however, surprised to see some new stuff here. The boots and wrist bracers are different from the previous Magneto releases, and he also has a new belt with an X-branded buckle and some pouches. The cape, however, is a straight repaint from the his appearance in the three-pack with Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.

I was expecting the head sculpt to be a straight repaint from that three-pack version as well, but it looks like it’s been reworked here. His Barbute-style helmet has been reshaped in a few areas, but unfortunately the paint on mine is pretty sloppy. It’s not too bad when viewed with the naked eye, but the closer you get, the worse it looks.

Magneto does not come with any effect parts or an un-helmeted head, but he does come with three pairs of hands, which I thought was oddly excessive. The token fists and power-casting hands are to be expected, but the third pair of accessory-holding hands seems pointless, since he comes with nothing to hold. Whatever the case, I found this figure to be a lot more photogenic and fun to play around with than Professor X. Sure, his look is a lot less imaginative than Xavier’s, but as an action figure, Magneto gets the nod as the better figure.

I was extremely excited for this wave, but I’ll confess that it feels to be off to a rocky start. I want to like the Professor X figure a whole lot more than I do. I can’t fault the design, as it looks just like his appearance in the book, but it just doesn’t make for a great figure. Magneto, on the other hand, at least isn’t a total quick-and-dirty repaint, and I’ve found that I like this look for him a lot. Next week, I’ll keep the reviews on this wave rolling along. I doubled up today because I knew I didn’t have a whole lot to say about these two, and I’m not sure if next week I’ll tackle another two figures or just focus on one!