Welcome to another Marvel Monday! I’m still meandering about and having a look at some one-offs and multipacks before starting in on a new wave of Marvel Legends. This week, I thought I’d keep the X-Men love rolling along with a look at the Deluxe Mojo release. So grab your favorite carbonated beverage, have a seat, and whatever you do, don’t touch that dial! We don’t want to tank the ratings!

I love Mojo! Or to be more accurate, I love all the backstory that surrounds him and the Mojoverse. It’s just the kind of batshit crazy sci-fi and on-the-nose satire that I love to find in my funnybooks! So naturally I was excited to the Grand Poobah of The Spineless Ones drop into the new Marvel Legends! This is the regular retail release of Mojo, but it was preceded by a multipack, which I believe Hasbro was calling an SDCC Exclusive. That set came with Longshot, Dazzler, and a Baby Wolverine. I was close to pulling the trigger on that release, but the Dazzler looked a lot like the retro-packaged release I already have, the Wolvie wasn’t really impressive, and I decided to just gamble on Longshot getting a release later on down the road, because… C’MON, HASBRO, YOU HAVE TO!!! Honestly, if it had included Spiral, I probably would have jumped at it, but now we know we’re getting her as a retro-carded release. Anyway… Mojo comes in a fully enclosed box with all his pieces wrapped in tissue paper. Yes, there is assembly required on this one, making me wonder if he wasn’t originally designed to be a BAF, like the old Toybiz version. The upper body and belly come in two pieces, the chair is three pieces, and you get two heads, two cables, and two sets of hands. Actually, a couple of the pieces are pretty large, so I doubt it really would have worked as a Build-A-Figure. Well, let’s slap this slug together and see what he’s all about!

First impressions? Mojo is a big, satisfying figure, but the sculpt is a mixed bag and Mojo himself looks really bland and in desperate need of more paint apps. Where’s the sickly slime? Where are the bumps and pustules? It’s just a lot of smooth skin. Couldn’t even paint them nipples, Hasbro? All in all, the deco is so simple, he looks more like an animated version. Actually scratch that, because I re-watched Mojoverse from the X-Men animated series while I was opening him, and the cartoon version really had more detail than this figure. The deco comes up especially short when compared to the delightfully gross look of the old Toybiz Legends release. You get a little bit of reddish shading around the bottom edge where his body meets the chair, and a little more around the shoulders and elbows, but that’s really it. What a shame!

The chair, on the other hand features some pretty nice detail, even if it is mostly just left as bare gray plastic. A little wash would have been nice, but all we get is some blue and red paint hits for some of the simulated lights I really dig the exposed nest of wires at the back of the chair, and the rather gross machine elements that intrude their way into Mojo’s flesh on the sides. It’s also cool how his skin is pressed in where the clamps secure him to the chair. The chair rests on four clear plastic bumps to give it the illusion that the spider legs are holding it up. Each of the legs are articulated with rotating hinges where they meet the body and at two other points, but they clearly aren’t up to the task of supporting the weight of Mojo and the chair. And that’s fine, the effect still looks good. You also get two grabber arms coming out of the front with the same rotating hinges to pose them. One has a partially closed claw, which is good for grabbing onto X-Men arms and legs, while the other is open. The hoses that connect to the back of the chair and into Mojo’s shoulders hold fairly well, but they did pop out a few times when I was posing him. The scorpion-like tail that arches up over the chair with its brace of weapons is rigid and not poseable.

The two portraits are pretty good. I especially like the detail in the cybernetic hair and all the little probes and wires coming down to hold his eyes open. This first head is my favorite of the two, as it has his mouth open and his tongue licking out between his agape jaws. It’s an excellent sculpt, and while the paint here is a little better than the rest of the body, I still feel like it needed more. There’s a splash of gloss around the mouth to give it a bit of slimy look, but the figure needed a lot more of that to keep it from looking so flat. The tongue and teeth really could have used a gloss coat too. The few scattered pimples on his neck, just serve to remind me how little else there is in the way of body detail.

The second head just features a big toothy, dementated grin. It’s still an excellent sculpt, but let down a little by the sloppy paint lines between gums and teeth. Everything else here is just as good as the first head, but I doubt I’ll display this one much at all. The other one is just so much more dynamic and expressive. I should note that I found it exceedingly difficult to get this head onto the ball joint. I had to use a lot of force to get it on, which is all the more reason for me not to swap them out very often.

Mojo’s articulation includes rotating hinges in the shoulders, swivels in the biceps. double hinges in the elbows, and pegged hinges in the wrists. You get two sets of hands, one are sort of open-grabby hands, the other set includes a right pointing hand, and a somewhat closed grasp that can be used to hold a figure. The upper body is on a ball jointed stalk, and the neck is set on a kind of dog bone ball joint. He attaches to the chair via three pegs, a strong central one and two smaller ones, so he is incapable of turning his body in the chair. Overall, I have no gripes with the articulation. He can do pretty much everything I want him to.

In the end, I like this figure a lot, but I don’t love it. At $55, there’s a lot of plastic here, two excellent portraits, and a lot of good articulation. But the paint apps are severely lacking. I’m totally fine with the chair, but Mojo himself needed some more detail in the body. Ideally, I would have liked to see more sculpted detail, but I really think that a decent paint job alone could have remedied the blandness that I’m seeing. It’s worth noting that the SDCC Exclusive got a bit more paint on the body, and that would really piss me off if it wasn’t executed in such a half-assed manner. The SDCC deco basically just amounts to some gray spots, and I’m it’s kind of a toss up to me, whether it actually looks better or worse than this retail release. In terms of larger Deluxe figures, this one is passable, but not nearly as impressive as the MODOK release.