Joss Whedon

The Marvel Legends line has been relatively good where the inclusion of female characters is concerned. Of course, this isn’t too difficult a pack to lead; suggest coming out with a female character to most toy companies, and they emit an unearthly shriek, crumbling to dust before your very eyes. Back during the first Star Wars prequel, for example, they’d come out with six or eight figures of Obi-Wan (a character who looked pretty much exactly the same throughout the movie) before they’d come out with three of Queen Amidala (a character who made a radical costume change every thirty seconds). When taken to task for this sort of thing, the toy companies have generally claimed that action figures of female characters simply don’t sell. And it is hard to imagine that these companies are wrong about this, that they don’t know their own numbers. Still, this is an unfortunate state of affairs all the same. Good on Hasbro, then, for maintaining the Legends line’s strength in this area; their first wave includes Emma Frost, and the second is scheduled to include Jean Grey from X3 and She-Hulk.

But the second wave is, of course, in the future, with the robot butlers and the five-course-meal pills. Today we will discuss Emma Frost, once a villainess, now an X-Man, an X-Man with guilt issues so powerful that they are actually capable of beating you up.

This figure depicts Frost as she was redesigned for Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s “Astonishing X-Men.” This is a comic title that has split the Internet in half, or, more accurately, into thirds: those who love it more than they love life itself; those who hate it with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns; and those who don’t care either way, and who are often fiercely proud of the fact. It’s a title that gets people whipped up, and it’s got quite a following. Enough of a following, in fact, that one wonders why there hasn’t been more of a rush to produce its characters in the form of poseable plastic.

Ms. Frost is, of course, packaged in the new Marvel Legends standard. It’s all bright colors and sweeping lines, jazzy and exciting, as if the kids these days don’t even have the attention span to look at a whole toy package unless you really grab ‘em. On the upper left of the card (from the viewer’s perspective), Frost is depicted running her fingers through her hair and generally doing her best sex-kitten. On the montage of images down the right of the plastic bubble, her other moods are showcased, moods like “gloomy,” “ready-for-action,” “haughty and arrogant,” and, um, “smiley.” On the whole, it’s a nice-looking piece of work.

As with other figures in this wave, the toy itself is held in place by the shape of its packaging, rather than by six tons of twist-ties, and that’s really, incredibly great, moreso than mere words can express. If you instead wish to leave it trapped, you can get a pretty good look at the figure in its package, though several viewing angles are blocked by cardboard inserts. Remarkably, “from below” is not one of those angles; there is a large hole in the cardboard at the bottom, apparently for the single purpose of allowing you to look at the figure from there. Whether you will find this experience intensely satisfying is debatable.

From the shoulders down, the sculpt of this figure is excellent. The seams on the clothing - as per John Cassaday’s artwork - are particularly impressive. The muscle-work is minimal, but gets the job done quite nicely. Some have complained that Emma is too thin, and / or too hourglass-shaped; that this figure represents an unreasonable, even hurtful, standard of feminine beauty. And this may be so. But it’s not Hasbro’s fault. That unreasonable standard comes from the Emma Frost of the comics. That unreasonable standard, in fact, comes from virtually every superheroine of every comic ever.

So it’s a good body sculpt. Above the shoulders, though, things take a bad turn. The neck, for starters, is incredibly long, like a picture from “Alice in Wonderland.” And the face is far too thin, with an unfortunate expression, commingling surprise and disgust. As if she’s just been told that the chardonnay she’s been drinking is actually urine. This, well, this is bad. Real bad.

This figure stands up as well as any figure with high heels, thin, thin legs, and a big, heavy top (the cape, I mean, weirdo!) possibly could. Which is to say, it’ll stand, but try not to jostle the shelf. It’d be great, therefore, if there were some holes in the feet, so you could put Emma on a stand, but such holes have been excised from the line by Hasbro. Bring ‘em back, Hasbro. Bring ‘em back.

Maybe someday, they’ll make a figure of Purple Man, and he’ll be wearing purple pants, and a purple shirt and purple shoes, all of them the same purple shade as his purple, purple person. And that figure will have a simpler sort of paint application than this one, which is of a blonde Caucasian woman wearing nothing but white, but not by much. And so the paint job here is perfectly fine, as it had better be; there are no areas of bleed or smudging worth noting, and there’s a little bit of very subtle blue shading on the clothing, which looks good.

The cape is a bit sloppier. It has a blue shading throughout its interior, and this tends to bleed around the edges. It’s particularly bad at the clasp in front. Like the head-sculpt problem, this is exactly where you don’t want it to be bad.

Articulation has never been as good on the female Marvel Legends as it’s been on the male ones. This has been due in some large part to the fantastically slender limbs on the women, and the b-grade plastic that Toybiz would often use. Too many joints on an arm that thin, and it was liable to break into pieces, which would then be immediately swallowed by an infant, and lawsuits all around. But Hasbro seems to be using a more durable plastic on this line, so that means that Emma should have more articulation, right?

You guessed it: Wrong. There are 25 points of articulation on this figure, which isn’t actually bad, but which is a very noticeable step down from the Legends standard. Especially so when you consider that six of those points are effectively useless: two at each shoulder (which can’t really be moved with the cape on) and two at the head (which can’t really be moved, what with the hair). The forearms and lower legs can’t twist, and the elbows don’t allow the arms to fold up against themselves. Overall, then, the articulation is best described as ‘fair.’ And in a line that really made its name through articulation, ‘fair’ is that much closer to ‘poor.’

Marvel Legends have generally only come with accessories when the characters in question have been particularly associated with some item. Thor has his hammer. Silver Surfer has his board, plus, mysteriously, Howard the Duck. And Emma Frost certainly has no such item, and therefore, no accessories. Nor is there a comic book, like there used to be; Hasbro has stopped packaging Legends with comics, which is too bad. There have been some pretty great Emma Frost comics.

The figure is packaged with the right arm and leg of Annihilus, the build-a-figure for this wave. But these aren’t really accessories for Emma, unless you want to pretend that she’s ripped off one of Annihilus’ limbs and is beating somebody with it. Not really her style, though.

The new management has raised the price of Marvel Legends, to $9.99 at Target, or $9.96 at Wal-Mart. That’s a three-cent savings, at the latter! Three cents! Buy 1000 of them, and that’s 30 bucks!

So: Hasbro has had the good sense to produce another figure from the very popular “Astonishing X-Men” comic. Rumor has it they’re going to do more, that we’ll soon be seeing the villain Danger and an Astonishing-style Cyclops. And this is likely a good marketing decision on their part. But does that make this figure a good buy?

Well, no. Probably not. The head and neck really are bad. The poseability is adequate at best. It doesn’t stand up terribly well. This is not an utterly awful figure; Marvel Legends has made worse, and it won’t actually look completely out of place with your other Astonishing X-Men, though you might want to put it toward the back. But it’s for completists only. And completists needn’t care about a critical review like this one, anyway.