Iron Man and Spider-Woman (Secret Wars #7 Comic Pack)

Height: Approx. Iron Man: 10.5cm to top of head. Spider-Woman: 10cm to top of head.

Articulation: Iron Man: 22 points total- ball-jointed neck; 5 points each arm: universal joint shoulder, bicep swivel, hinged elbow, swivel wrist; mid-torso ball joint; 5 points each leg: ball-joint hip, double-joint knee, universal joint ankle.

Spider-Woman: 21 points total- ball-jointed neck; 4 points each arm: universal joint shoulder, hinged elbow, swivel wrist; mid-torso ball joint; swivel waist; 5 points each leg: ball-joint hip, double-joint knee, universal joint ankle.

Colors: Iron Man: Molded red and yellow; painted red and black; metallic overspray.

Spider-Woman: Molded black, white, and yellow-orange. Painted white, black, fleshtone, and red(lips); red-orange wash (hair) and blue overspray.

Accessories: Secret Wars Issue #7.

Release Data: Released in 2009 with an SRP of $12.99.

Author: RAC

(more...)


I really like comics as a pack-in with action figures! It seems like such a natural combination. In the distant past exclusive mini-comics were the thing, but Toy Biz packed a reprint comic with nearly every Marvel Legend they made- a habit that Hasbro and Mattel both picked up on for various lines. But I'm pretty sure this line is the first time that Hasbro's applied the idea to the Marvel license, oddly enough. The Secret Wars two-packs seem to be built around the reissue of an existing figure alongside an all-new character. Since I've taken that big jump into scale change, I thought I'd take advantage of it and get some characters that eluded me in Legends-scale: namely, Spider-Woman II. And hey, she comes with another Iron Man! That's just about the perfect pack for me.


Iron Man

This is the same mold that was released in the Marvel Universe line in both regular and stealth flavors. I find it a bit on the skinny side- there's a new version in the Iron Man 2 line that looks a bit better. The colors are a little bit brighter than the MU release here, and I like that. And the striped parts of the armor are all done pretty cleanly, especially for the size.
There's also one intangible difference to consider: this isn't Tony Stark, but Jim Rhodes. Not that you can tell by looking at the armor, but still, Rhodey.

There's a bit of a missed opportunity here, as the later issues of Secret Wars featured a subtly altered Iron Man armor, the result of repairs by Reed Richards, and it might've been better to have that version in a later pack. Iron Man's an odd choice to pack with this particular comic anyway, as he has all of two pieces of dialogue and doesn't actually do anything. Going by the actual comic, She-Hulk would have been a good choice, but there are a variety of reasons why you wouldn't want her in this two-pack. For example, her costume is really stupid-looking and she gets beaten half to death in this issue.

Anyway!

The head looks good, has the full 360 degrees of swivel, and has more tilt than any version of Iron Man or War Machine I've yet gotten in this scale. The red paint doesn't wrap around the bottom of the head, though, leaving a yellow ring where there should not be one. The shoulders swivel unimpeded and raise a little higher than collarbone level when lifted to the sides. As opposed to the GI Joe-style universal joint elbows in the Iron Man 2 line, we have bicep swivels here, and on the much plainer upper arms of this Iron Man those work pretty well and look good. The elbows are single hinges that are shaped well and get a tight 90-degree bend. My personal criteria is that anything less on a toy this size is a bad thing, and anything more is gravy. Same hand setup here as the movie figures: repulsor-firing on the left, punching on the right. The repulsor hand has a problem common to Iron Man figures: it can't move the wrist enough to get any decent repulsor-firing poses. The single-packed figure also has an energy-effect accessory you could use on the left hand, but since you get a comic and two figures for a buck or two less than the usual cost of two figures, no such luck here.

The torso joint tilts convincingly front-to-back, and swivels unimpeded. There's a little bit of rough paint on the sides of the torso, where the yellow shows through the seams. The traditional discs on the hips of the armor are separate, soft-plastic pieces. One of them came horrendously misaligned on my figure, and doesn't seem to be adjustable. The IM2 Comic Series figure seems to have these molded as part of the lower torso, which is probably for the best. The hips are more in the GI Joe style here, being a ball-joint with no thigh swivels. I like the ease of adjustment, but I'm not sure how much I like the more limited range- they don't even get far enough out to the sides to butt up against those discs. Frontwards they do okay- enough to sit and kneel fairly well. The knees are great, getting a full U-bend once I wiggled them out of joint-lock. (That makes me nervous every time.) The ankles' tilt is minimal, but the swivel is unimpeded.


Spider-Woman

This is the Spider-Woman I remember best, since she was the only one throughout most of the `80s and `90s. These day she's Arachne (since Brian Michael Bendis dredged up the original Spider-Woman) and is presumably still working with Omega Flight- a book that I couldn't suffer through because it took them around six issues just to tell the "putting the team together" story. You know, the one that's historically supposed to take half of issue #1, or at most Part 1 of a 2-part story? Yeah, that story. Six issues. Stupid decompressed storytelling. As you may remember (or see on her Wikipedia entry) she was also a member of Force Works, the team Tony Stark founded when the West Coast Avengers folded. Sadly, I bet it'll be a good long while (if ever) before we get Century, or the correct versions of US Agent or Scarlet Witch. But I figure our odds are good to get the right Iron Man suit this year, and between him, Spider-Woman, War Machine and Hawkeye(in one of the other Secret Wars 2-packs), that's a fair chunk of animated Force Works!

Julia has the same deco problem that the first MU release of Symbiote Costume Spider-Man apparently did, that the blue highlights don't work as well as they ought. For one, there's no easy real-world way to make blue highlights on black costumes work the way they did in comics- it just doesn't look right in three dimensions, not from every possibly angle. Second, since she's got blue highlights on her white thigh-high boots on every example I've seen, it doesn't look very good either. I'd like to see one actually done in black and white, like this costume is supposed to be. Similarly, the paint on her hair isn't entirely successful- to simulate her particular shade of strawberry blonde hair, they've molded her hair in blonde-colored plastic with a red-orange wash. The color's similar in places, but the blondeness is still the overwhelming color- especially since the underside of the piece has no paint wash at all. So mainly it looks like she really needs a new hair stylist.

The head sits pretty high on the neck, which looks odd. If the idea was to make sure that the head could turn despite her long hair, then that was a success- the head can swivel completely and tilt ever so slightly. But her hair is sculpted as though it was meant to rest on her shoulders, which fall something like a centimeter lower. It's also sculpted in a looser, more flowing style that matches her later comic appearances more than her look in the included first appearance; it's never explicitly shown as being drawn into a ponytail, but it tends to gather at her neck and then drape over one shoulder, which to my knowledge is not something long hair does without assistance. I have no idea if attempting that would've made the neck height and articulation issues better or worse.

The shoulders are perfect. That is to say, they turn in a full circle and can be raised so that the arms are straight up- there's no physical way you can get more range out of them. The elbows get a respectable 90 degrees. Like all the other figures I have in this scale, she has one open hand and one fist- the order is reversed from the usual Iron Man sides, though. You may notice that I haven't mentioned a swivel of any kind, and that's because there is none. Hasbro has a habit of limiting joints in their female figures, I suppose for fear of the smaller limbs being less stable. It took quite a while for the women of GI Joe and Cobra to get the knee double-joints that they- and Julia -now enjoy. Thing is, even those first 25th Anniversary GI Joes had universal joint elbows, so I have no idea why Spider-Woman wouldn't.

Unlike most figures in this scale she has a torso joint and a waist. This is good, because the placement of the torso joint means that it really doesn't turn at all. It does however tilt front-to-back without problems, and has a fair range in doing so. There's a stopping point of some sort that lets you know when the waist is centered- it's actually not that difficult to line up all these joints so that the spider logo isn't a jumbled mess. Her hip joints are the same as Rhodey's- I guess this is the official Marvel Universe style of hip joints. They're about the same in terms of range too, which doesn't seem quite as good for an unarmored person who does a lot of Spider-Man-style acrobatics. Her knees double over though, so that's a plus, and while she doesn't lean into her step any better than Iron Man, she can point her toes a bit better.


Accessories

-Secret Wars Issue #7

It's on much nicer paper than was typical for comics of the period, even though the paper's a little bit on the distressingly thin side here. There's a Marvel ad on the inside front cover and two Hasbro Marvel ads on the back cover, and otherwise the book is ad-free. I've never read Secret Wars, but chapter 7 of 12 is never a good place to start. Maybe the local library will have the TPB...


Closing Remarks

Each figure in the set has its good points and bad points. Iron Man comes off a little better in this set than the Spider-Woman I bought it for- she's got deco issues and could do with a bit more articulation. I'd call him a low-end Very Good and her a solid Good, and I think the set averages out to Good overall. But even so, with a better version of this Iron Man being available, and him being the superior figure in the set, you better really want Spider-Woman if you go to buy this.

-RAC