If you follow me on Twitter than you probably know that I’m a big fan of Zenescope Comics. I started reading their flagship title, Grimm Fairy Tales, a while ago as a guilty pleasure and slowly got sucked into the wider universe of characters and other books until I had an entire shelf devoted to their floppies, trades, and a few limited edition hardcovers. Plus, since Marvel has forsaken me with their bullshit, I’ve been leaning on Zenescope a lot more lately as a new outlet for my comic book dollars. Sadly, there’s been precious little in the way of Zenescope merchandising, with the shining exception being a small assortment of Sixth-Scale figures from Phicen and Executive Replicas. I’ve already looked at Mercy Dante and Robyn Hood, Today I’m going back to their very first release: Liesel Van Helsing!

The packaging is still quite similar to the two followups: Robyn and Mercy. And the presentation here is first rate. You get a wraparound sleeve with the Grimm Universe logo and the figure’s name on the front as well as some wonderful character art on the back and side panel. The other side panel has the figure’s name so you can line these up on a shelf and still tell who is who. The high-quality box is black and textured with a magnetic front flap and a foam tray that contains the figure and accessories. The packaging rarely ever makes or breaks a collectible for me, but when you’re paying a lot it’s nice to get a premium presentation. This is definitely a lot more effort than Hot Toys has put into the packages for their recent releases, and I appreciate that, especially from such a small company.

And here she is all ready for action. Van Helsing features the ever amazing, and a little bit creepy, Phicen realistic super-flexible body. I’ve lost track of which particular model body this is, as they’re constantly making changes and improvements, but suffice it to say, you get a stainless steel skeleton wrapped in a shapely silicone muscle and skin, which feels squishy to the touch and only shows seams at the neck and wrists even if you were to strip them down. Oh yes… and enormous boobs. Because Phicen. And Zenescope. There isn’t a whole lot of set up required to get Liesel ready for display, but she does come with her trench coat off and getting it on is a MAJOR pain in the ass. Besides having to deal with the friction of getting the realistic silicone rubbing against the sleeves, you also have to pop her hands off and getting the hands off of the steel ball joints is frustrating. Once this jacket went on, there was no way I was taking it off again. The same goes for the accessory holding hands, so I’ll mention now that she does come with an extra pair of relaxed hands and a pair of fists, even though you won’t see them used in this review. Now… let’s take a quick trip around her outfit.

As a girl displaced in time, Liesel’s wardrobe has had several looks throughout her various appearances, but Phicen went for her most traditional and iconic 19th Century monster hunter garb. And might I say, they did a fabulous job with her costume. The troublesome trench coat is great once it’s in place and features a belt on the back so it can be cinched tighter and there’s a wire in the bottom so it can retain a flowing look for those action poses. It’s a cool blending of modern and vintage, with the big buccaneer sleeves to give it that hint of period attire.

The red and black corset is made out of a similar leather-like material with four individual belts running across her tummy and two pointed half cups tasked with the momentous job of keeping her goodies in place. These can be a little frustrating because there is about a two millimeters difference between them doing their job and Liesel suffering a nip-slip. I had to do quite a few re shoots to keep this review at a PG rating. Moving further down, she sports a very scant pair of tight shorts some real fishnet stockings. The stockings are done very well, although you do still get some bunched up seams, which are probably impossible to avoid at this scale.

The high boots feature buckles running across the fronts and real laces running up to the top. I am going to presume that these are boot-feet, but I’m not about to unlace them to find out.

The head sculpt is fair but not exceptional. It’s a far cry from what we got for Mercy and Robyn. Those were sculpted specifically for those figures and definitely looked the part. This one appears to be one of Phicen’s generic heads, as I can see a lot of resemblance to some of their other boxed figure releases. Still, Liesel can look a little different from book to book depending on who’s drawing her, so I don’t think using this head was a total flub. Plus, this was their first release in this line, so I’m prepared to cut them a little slack. Besides, I think she has really pretty eyes. At least the long black hair is very much on point, and when you include the choker necklace and her trademark hat, it’s easy for me to tell who this is supposed to be, even if I were just seeing her from the neck up.

The hat is spot on to what she’s often wearing in the comics and is comprised of both leather-like material and felt. It holds its shape perfectly and it also includes Liesel’s rather distinctive glasses. These can be removed from the hat and worn over her eyes, but it’s not like she does that a lot in the comics, so I’m happy to keep them where they are.

Most of Liesel’s equipment can be worn on her person and she does possess some nifty monster-slaying tools, albeit none of the truly outlandish stuff she invents in the comics. For starters, she wears a brace of stakes on her right hip. She comes with five wooden stakes and five silver ones. I went with the wooden ones for my display because I liked the look of them a little better and I am a traditionalist. A better prepared monster hunter would probably mix them up for when you have to switch between dispatching vampires and werewolves on the fly.

There isn’t a proper scabbard for her sword, but it can be easily thrust through the belt on her left hip and it looks good there. The sword features a short thrusting blade and a rather ornate hilt with a curved knucklebow and sculpted pommel. It fits perfectly in the intended left hand and the fingers are flexible enough so that it’s easy to bend them and get the sword in place. As is sometimes the case with Phicen’s accessories, the sword does feel a little flimsy in hand and the blade is a little bendy, but overall I think it looks great.

The strap on Liesel’s lower right thigh includes a holster for her shotgun and there’s an ammo pouch as well. And yes, she comes with two teeny-tiny extra shells to put in there if you want. The breech on the shotgun can be opened and there are two more teeny-tiny shells sculpted inside. The sculpt and finish on the shotgun is beautiful. It features checkered brown grips and a gunmetal blued finish with a stainless steel finish on the barrels. Her accessory holding right hand fits it perfectly.

Next up is her crossbow, which is painted to resemble wood with some lovely steampunk-looking fixtures and a scope. It’s also fitted with a string, which can be drawn back and hooked on the catch so you can load one of the five silver bolts into it. Liesel also comes with a quiver for the extra arrows and a hook to store the crossbow, but it’s designed to work with her when she’s not wearing her trench coat, and since I’m always going to display her with it on, it’s not a lot of use to me and it tends to stay in the box.

The final extra is a figure stand, which normally would be a no-brainer, but Robyn Hood didn’t come with one, so it’s not always a given when it comes to Phicen’s Sixth-Scale figures. Indeed, even my recent purchase from ThreeZero didn’t come with a stand, so I guess packed in stands aren’t as common as they used to be. Anyway, Van Helsing’s stand is identical to the one that came with Mercy. It has a base with a post that can hold the figure, but the post isn’t very helpful. The base, however, has thick pegs, which connect with holes in the figure’s boots just like a standard 3 3/4-inch figure. It’s an odd system to see in these larger scale figures, and the base isn’t anything special, but it works pretty well.

Liesel set me back about $150, which feels like a pretty good value in the current Sixth-Scale market, especially since the subject matter here is for a pretty limited audience. As much as I love the character, I can’t imagine her books sell more than 4,000 copies, so to get an action figure of this scope and quality based on her is a real treat. Not to mention that she comes with a lot of stuff, her outfit is carefully detailed, and the Phicen body provides endless fun for posing. I was also lucky to not have to pay a lot over her retail, since I started collecting this line late in the game and had to track her down. I eventually found her in the last but most obvious of places, Zenescope’s website, and I’m convinced I may have gotten the last one because she was removed from the site a day after I successfully placed the order!

On the downside, I’m not sure that the relationship between Phicen and Zenescope has much of a future. They showed off a Goblin Queen figure from Grimm Fairy Tales at one of the big Comic Cons a couple of years back, but it appears to have been quietly cancelled. They do have a figure due to ship any week now based off The Goddess of Death, Keres, from No Tomorrow and Grimm Tales of Terror, but they took a lot of liberties with the design of that figure to the point where it just looks like it’s loosely based on the character design. I don’t know that I’m going to pull the trigger on it. I’d like to support the line, but at this point I don’t buying that figure will save it. It’s a shame, because a release of Sela Mathers, Brittany Waters, or Belinda would have been fairly easy to do and my collection feels rather incomplete without at least having Sela on my shelf.

There’s no better endorsement for a first purchase than following it up with a quick second. I had Phicen’s Mercy Dante in hand for just a few hours before I found myself clicking the Buy It Now button on another release in the Zenescope-Phicen partnership. I’ve had this figure for a while now, allowing myself some time with her and also waiting until I had enough time to do her justice, and I’ve finally been able to set aside enough time to do just that. So let’s dive in and check out Robyn Locksley, aka. Robyn Hood! But first… background!

Robyn Locksley was just your average everyday baby that was saved from a satanic ritual in a fantasy realm called Myst, portal-ed to another world called Earth, and left on the doorstep of what might as well have been a crack-house. Needless to say, Robyn had a rough upbringing, which included selling illegal drugs for her foster father to pay for her ailing foster mother’s medicine, getting kicked out of the house after her mother died, and then beaten within an inch of her life and having her eye slashed out by an underprivileged jock who’s father basically runs the town. OK, she did steal the guy’s car and total it, but that’s hardly an excuse! And just as things couldn’t get much worse for her, she was summoned back to Myst, where she adopted the guise of Robyn Hood and helped the downtrodden people of Bree overthrow their asshole tyrant of a king. She bounced between Myst and Earth a couple more times, but eventually she settled down back on Earth and opened up a detective agency/vigilante service, where she investigates weird doings and serves up justice at the point of an arrow. Robyn Hood is a fun read. The first three collected trades take you through her adventures in Myst, but her ongoing book, on which today’s figure is based, sees her plying her trade on present day Earth. She’s also appeared in quite a few of Zenescope’s crossovers and one-shots, but I better not get ahead of myself…

Like Mercy, the figure comes in a generic shipper box with the character’s name on it. Inside, you get a colorful, high quality box with a deco designed to match Mercy’s should you wish to line them up on the shelf. There’s colorful character art on the back and side panels, the character’s name on the other side panel, and a nice logo for The Grimm Universe on the front. Unlike Mercy’s box, which featured a wrap-around magnetized cover, this one has an illustrated sleeve and an opening front flap for the box. I really love the presentation here and I’d actually rate it higher than what we’ve been getting out of Hot Toys these days. Inside the box, the figure is nestled in a cut foam tray with a second layer beneath with more goodies hidden below.

Robyn comes out of the box wearing most of her outfit (hey, clothes are not something you can take for granted with Phicen!), but she does require a little bit of work to get her look complete. The base costume includes her stylish, midriff revealing top, tactical pants and high, buckled boots. The top and bottom garments are beautifully stitched and consist of a mix of the camo cloth and a black pleather material, which does a great job recreating the modern outfit that she wore in Legacy and her ongoing comic. She also has a very soft cloth hood that hangs down off of the back of her top.

The boots are actually boot feet and they look really great. They feature some nice, clean stitching, silver buckles running up the sides, and treads sculpted into the soles. The bottoms of the feet include chunky peg holes that work with any of Phicen’s stands, but more on that later. The ankles joints are pretty strong and capable of holding her in just about any pose I could think of.

Robyn’s outfit is rounded out by a belt and a pair of bracers on her forearms. The belt features a sculpted belt buckle and has four brown leather-like pouches on each hip. The bracers are basically pleather sleeves, which slide on the forearms and mate nicely with the painted, finger-less gloves that are sculpted as part of the hands. Each bracer is also fitted with a plastic armor plate with sculpted straps. Another extras includes a strap for her right bicep, which holds four throwing daggers. This is an amazing accessory, but oh boy is it flirting with danger by putting those sharp daggers near her skin. Care is recommended whenever manipulating that arm so as not to puncture anything!

Robyn also comes with an rig of hip pouches that clips into the rings to the left and right of her belt buckle, and again on the back of her belt. These pouches have opening flaps, which secure with velcro and can be used to hold all her extra arrow tips or whatever else you might want to throw in there. Extra bow string? Magic crystals? Sure, why not?

The beauty of her outfit is that it doesn’t restrict her movement hardly at all, and that’s a wonderful thing when dealing with the Phicen body, which is based off a stainless steel skeleton that claims to mimic 90% of human flexibility quite. The ultimate test was being able to get her down on one knee without fear of pulling any stitches in the clothing or popping any joints. I don’t know of too many of my Hot Toys that could do the same. Keep in mind that the only seams on this entire figure are at her wrists and her neck. Truly a work of art!

The portrait is very nice, although it’s worth noting that Phicen is still a ways off from reaching the mad head skillz of Hot Toys. That having been said, I think this is a great likeness for the character. Her left eye, which I’m pretty sure I mentioned was gouged out by an asshole with a piece of glass, has the mystical eye that she um… grew? in the Realm of Myst and helps her to see what her bow sees. Her remaining real eye has something pretty close to that spark of life that we see in Hot Toys’ figures, and the paint for her eyebrows and lips is immaculate. Robyn features long blonde rooted hair, which can be difficult to get under control. A little touch of gel helps, but I feel like there’s always going to be one or two fly-away strands.

The cloth hood is capable of holding all her hair inside it, or you can snake some of it around and off her shoulder. Again, the more you play with it, the more you can get the hair under control and tucked away. Either way, I think the hood looks great on her and I really dig the soft material they used for it.

Robyn comes with a nice assortment of hands, and here’s where one of the figure’s main flaws comes into play. These are an absolute bitch to change out. The sockets in the hands tend to grip tighter than the sockets in the skeleton, which means the ball joint is more likely to come out of the arm than the one in the hand. On a Hot Toys or Sideshow figure, this is no big deal, but on a Phicen it’s incredibly frustrating to get the ball back into the arm socket, because you have to be careful about stretching or damaging the skin. The alternative is to have a hair dryer handy to heat up the hand enough so that the ball joint is more likely to pull out of the hand. I’ve had success with this in the past, but I currently don’t own a hairdryer. As a result, you’ll note that all the pictures I shot use the same two hands. I got those in and I’m sticking with them for now! Anyway, the ones on her are designed for holding the bow and knocking an arrow. You also get two tight holding hands, and two pairs of hands in slightly different relaxed states.

Of course it wouldn’t be Robyn Hood without her trusty bow and quiver of arrows. The quiver is plastic and is slung over her shoulder with a belt and working buckle. The arrows all feature interchangeable arrow heads. You get standard heads for each one, plus a few specialized types. These include a bullet arrow and a syringe arrow. She even comes with a length of string to tie around a grapple hook arrows, although i haven’t messed with that yet. One issue here is that the arrow heads tend to fit loosely on the shafts. This makes it super easy to swap them out, but they also have a habit of dropping off in the quiver if you put them in with the quills up. Which is why you’ll see most of the pictures with the arrows stored in the quiver with the tips up.

The bow itself is a beautiful piece. It’s sculpted with sensual curves and cast in a beautiful pearlescent green and gray plastics with the fixtures painted gold. Phicen’s boxed figures can sometimes be a little lacking in the quality of their accessories, but that is certainly not the case here. Indeed, my only complaint with the bow is that the string doesn’t have enough give to pose her with the string drawn back. Seeing as how some sellers piece these figures out, I’m tempted to try to get a second bow for her and re-string it with something a little more pliable.

While I’ve had almost nothing but praise for this figure, there is one big oversight that’s pretty hard to swallow. Robyn Hood comes with no stand. Zip! Now, luckily I have a healthy supply of the generic Sixth-Scale stands that you see her resting on above. Indeed, the stands that came with my other Zenescope Phicens aren’t much to get excited about, which is why I swapped them out with these better ones. But still, it takes some balls of steel to release a Sixth-Scale figure at this price point and not even toss in a goddamn stand! It’s a good thing I’m so smitten with her, that I’m willing to overlook those kinds of shenanigans.

While Phicen’s generic figures still tend to be pretty affordable, the boxed and licensed figures are slowly creeping up there in price. Previous Zenescope Phicens like Mercy Dante and Van Helsing ran around $159, while Robyn here jumped to $179 and quickly sold out at most retailers. Oh, I’m not complaining, mind you. She’s still clocking in at well under even what Sideshow is charging these days. The fact that someone is producing high quality collectible figures based on my beloved Zenescope books is reason enough to get me to open up my checkbook before even asking “how much?” And besides, there’s a lot to love here and it’s pretty easy to see where the money went. The body is killer, the head sculpt is solid, and the costume and gear are both fantastic. Sure, there are a few little design hiccups here and there, but it’s sometimes easy to forget that Phicen is a pretty small fish in a big ocean of accomplished Sixth-Scale figure companies. I’ve still got one more release in Phicen’s Zenescope partnership to look at, so probably sometime next month I’ll swing back and check out Liesel Van Helsing!