Today I’m checking out the penultimate figure in the Marvel Legends Armadillo Wave, and I very nearly skipped it. Since I’m pulling back on Marvel Legends, I have been asking myself, why bother reviewing an entire wave if you aren’t buying everything anymore anyway? But in the end, I decided that if I bought all the figures in a wave, I might as well check them all out here. And that brings us to Black & Gold Suit Spider-Man.

There was a lot of speculation about this suit when it was first revealed. It seemed to have mystical glyphs imprinted in the material and the gauntlets had a certain Strange-ness about them, if ya know what I mean. A lot of these details can be seen in Hot Toys’ Sixth-Scale version. But in the end it was all a big nothing, and it turned out to be just the regular suit turned inside out because Peter Parker got paint on it. Yeah. I kind of wish they had the balls to just put Inside Out Suit on the package. Black & Gold Suit just sounds like he’s trying to make a fashion statement.

Just to recap, all the way back to my review of the Integrated Suit, I really didn’t like that design, but the figure came close to selling it to me. You could say the same about this suit and the Hot Toys figure, but in the case of this Legends figure, well, it’s just a load of crap that makes a bad design look even worse. The black suit with gold webbing might have worked for me if the webbing was consistent throughout, and it didn’t have those red bits on the sleeves. Now, this comes down to a design inconsistency, where the Hot Toys figure shows some beautifully intricate gold on the forearms, which I presume is the exposed circuitry inside the suit when it’s worn normally. Here you just get the out of place red bits that look terrible. Why the difference? Who knows? Who cares!

The paint on the head is really bad. At least the gold webbing on the rest of the figure is fairly well done. It has a nice gold leaf finish and most of the lines are pretty sharp. The gold webbing on the head looks like it was done with a crayon before slapping the figure into the box. There’s also a lot of sloppy spray around the white eye lenses. Yuck!

You get all the usual articulation in the modern Spidey bucks, and that includes the lateral butterfly joints on the shoulders. It may be ugly, but it’s still a pretty fun figure to play around with.

Hey, let’s talk hands… because I have to gripe about hands in EVERY review throughout this wave. Nope, still no crawling hands, but you do get thwippy hands and fists. No wait… not fists. Accessory holding hands. WHAT?? WHY??? Is it so he can hold on to the webbing he doesn’t come with and swing? How is it possible they made the hand selection EVEN WORSE?!?

Wow, do I hate this figure. In all honesty, the inside out suit gag in No Way Home was kind of funny and a very Peter Parker thing to have to do. Almost as bad as having to throw on a Fantastic Four suit and run home barefoot with a bag on your head. But this figure is just trash. Hot Toys is proof positive that something could be done with the design to make an attractive figure, and yes, I do understand that we’re talking about a big difference in cost between that one and this one. But even for what it is, this figure just looks sloppy and half-assed. Next week, I’ll wrap up the boxed figures with Miles Morales, and we’ll check out the Armadillo Build-A-Figure!

Welcome back to another Marvel Monday! This week, I’m kicking off a brand new wave, and by that I really mean an older wave that’s on my backlog pile. The Armadillo Wave is a smattering of Spider-Man based figures covering everything from the MCU films, comics, and even the GamerVerse! I’d say only about two-thirds of this assortment really interested me, but the Armadillo Build-A-Figure was enough to tip me over to getting the whole wave. Let’s start today with Spider-Man in his Integrated Suit as he appeared in No Way Home, and then J. Jonah Jameson!

I re-watched No Way Home a couple of weeks back and I still really dig that movie a lot. Indeed, as sad as I am to say it, right now these Sony-Disney efforts are about the only thing holding my attention toward the MCU these days. Integrated Suit Spider-Man does not come with any BAF parts, but I’m guessing Hasbro figured this one would be the most desirable one in the wave and that he’d have no problem selling on his own.

The Integrated Suit is basically a merged version of both the Iron-Spider and Upgraded Suit, and the design is definitely not one of my favorites. I tend to like my Spidey suits red and blue and vibrant, although the straight-up Iron-Spider Suit was spiffy enough to get my approval. This one takes the black and red from the upgraded Suit and adds some gold trim and a gold spider emblem on the chest and back, as well as gold web-shooters. The gold does spruce up the Upgraded Suit design, but I still think this whole design is just a mess. Of course, none of that is the figure’s fault, and to be fair, I think Hasbro did a pretty nice job with what they had to work with. The paint here is very sharp, and the texturing on the red parts of the suit looks fantastic. I do, however, think a little wash or panel lining in the web pattern would have looked nice.

You get only one portrait, which feels kind of cheap given the lack of a BAF part. Hasbro has enough Tom Holland heads by now that they really should have thrown one in here. And if not an unmasked head, than maybe a second masked head with squinting eyes.

The articulation is everything I expect from my Spidey Legends these days, which means it has all the usual points plus the shoulder crunches. You won’t get some of the extreme poses you will out of the more expensive imports, but I still had a whole bunch of fun playing around with this figure, and he’ll likely spend some time on my desk so I have something to fiddle around with on my down time.

You get two sets of hands: Fists and thwippy hands, and once again here the figure comes up short. With no BAF part and no extra head, the least Hasbro could have done was throw in the splayed finger hands we’ve seen with some previous Spidey Legends releases. I think this wave came out before the big price hike, but with Legends now approaching $30 each, I’m going to need more to get me to keep going even as a selective buyer.

Overall, I think this is a decent figure, it’s just based on a suit design that I’m not terrifically fond of. Still, if anything I think the design works better as a toy than on the big screen and Hasbro did a decent job making me like it a little more here. An extra head, another pair of hands, and a little linework on the web pattern, and I’d have no other complaints. Still, even with no BAF part, I’m glad I picked him up. Let’s move on to J.J. Jameson!

OK, so I absolutely lost my shit when I saw that post-credits stinger at the end of Far From Home with J.K. Simmons reprising his role as J. Jonah, and again in No Way Home. Say what you will about the Raimi Spider-Man movies, and I am most definitely still a fan, but Simmons as Jameson was pitch-perfect casting. It was inspired. Still, this figure is something of a consolation prize, because I would have much rather had younger, newspaperman Jameson from those films as a modern Legends figure. But hey, I’ll take what I can get, and I still think this figure is a real treat. This looks to be mostly a reuse of the business-suit body that we’ve seen in the past with characters like Agent Coulson and Chameleon, but the lack of tie puts it a lot closer to the Bruce Banner figure we got in the Age of Ultron 4-pack. The key difference is Jameson here has one button of the sports jacket buttoned. I don’t remember seeing that on a previous suited figure, so it may be some new sculpting there, or just recycled from a figure I missed. The suit is blue, the underlying shirt is white, and he’s got a freshly polished pair of black shoes. Yup, this was a pretty easy figure for Hasbro to knock out, and as such I don’t have a whole lot to say about it.

The two portraits are really spot on for a contemporary Simmons. And even without the full head of hair and the trademark silver wing tips, this is still J. Jonah through and through. The sculpt does a beautiful job of recreating every line in his face, both in the relatively calm portrait and the angry shouty one. And let’s be honest, who among us is going to display this figure without the shouty face?

You get two sets of hands, the first of which are relaxed hands. Well, I say relaxed hands, but they really aren’t. They’re actually more like flat karate chop hands, and they don’t really fit this figure unless you want to have Jameson doing the robot at the Daily Bugle’s annual Christmas party. And honestly, I just don’t think that’s his style. A pair of actual relaxed hands would have been more welcome here, and we all know Hasbro has done them before, so it’s odd they went with these instead.

Now, the second pair is more his type. You get a pointing finger on his right hand and a left hand that is clenched into a tight fist of righteous anger. Combine these with the shouty head, and you’ve got all you’ll ever need!

As I stand with one foot ready to step outside the Marvel Legends collecting circle, figures like these give me hope that maybe I’m not quite done yet. Jameson surely isn’t the most exciting figure around and he isn’t the version of Simmons/Jameson that I really wanted, BUT… I love him, and I love that Hasbro gave him to us. Likewise, the Integrated Suit ranks pretty far down on my list of Spider-Man’s MCU suits, and yet I can still find some fun and joy in this figure. Off the top of my head, I honestly couldn’t tell you what other figures are in this wave, so it’ll be a surprise when I dive into the box to get my next figure to review, but so far the assortment is off to a pretty OK start.