feihong

I found my local cube today, but it was decimated. There was even an Iron Man figure where somebody had popped off and taken just the head of the thing. There was nothing left of interest but a few Wreckers and Iron Patriots, and I already have both of those. No comic packs at all, and no new Iron Man line or Spiderman line figures either. I'm disillusioned; this cube is lame.

That tears it. All of you guys are having such good luck with TRU. I'm going back tomorrow to look for the cube again.

SKull, those are awesome. What's the recipe for the Longshot figure? I HAVE to know!

The Toycade guys on ebay expect it in "late September."

Captain Britain, Mystique and Ghost Rider arrived in the mail today. And they looked awesome. pictures aren't really doing this particular set of figures justice in my mind. My Ghost Rider went up on my XO Wolverine bike, and things looked fine. I have him perched up pretty high, so I don't have to look at or worry about the damn "X" painted on the top. It's cool when you feel like you're filling in gaps in the Marvel Universe here. I just put Cap Britain next to Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde, and it felt so right. That actually placed Britain nearby Guardian, which made me laugh a bit. Mystique next to Magneto and Sabertooth made some sense, too. It's like the feeling when you complete the Wrecking Crew. All's suddenly right in the world.

Yup. East L.A. I found the comic pack at a Target in Alhambra, and the others at Universal Citywalk. Most of the places I looked today were trying to offload old Namors and Green Goblins. The new figure I saw at most places was the gold renaissance Iron Man.

Good haul today. I netted the Silver Centurion Iron Man, the long-haired Winter Soldier variant, and the Dark Avengers comic pack with Venom and Daken. Strange thing about the comic pack though was the comic inside--it had the cover of Dark Avengers #1 but no number on it. Inside it turned out to be not Dark Avengers #1 at all, but the Exodus special issue that ended the Dark Avengers/X-men Utopia storyline. Not only that, but the Terry Dodson-drawn pages where Emma Frost confronts the Sentry were missing from the book. Bizarre.

That's a perfect Dr. Nemesis. He's the guy who helped to fabricate the original, android Human Torch--recently they've brought him into X-men continuity and he has become one of the more engaging add-ons to the team--full of withering sarcasm and basically taking over all the stuff that Beast used to do now that Beast is defecting to the Secret Avengers. Does the hat come from an Indiana Jones figure?

That figure looks totally rad, man. Did you get that from Fatman? I like that Mystique seems to have two hands able to grip objects. She's often been depicted in recent years holding a pair of pistols, or something like that.

My Wrecker and Iron Patriot arrived in the mail today. Both figures are awesome. Wrecker doesn't look nearly as clunky and pinheaded as he looks in the photographs I've seen. And now I've completed the Wrecking Crew! Exciting. I'm going to wait on the Skrulls until I find them cheaper. No one's seen the Target exclusives or the new comic packs, right? That's what I'm looking for now.

Hawkeye is one of the finest figures. The new Colossus figure and the AIM soldier are also very nicely detailed and cool. Got the new Juggernaut figure in the mail today. He looks very neat. He's growing on me. I've never really jumped to attention when a comic features a Juggernaut appearance. I don't dislike him. He really has a strange costume design, in terms of the real-world. Saying nothing about his tiny, disproportionate head (maybe the perfect Rob Liefield character), the virtually all-brown costume is perfect for classic comics, with navy-to cobalt blue backdrops, colored by Glynnis Oliver. But on my shelf full of color-coded Shaw Bros DVD spines he blends in almost completely. The brown gives him such a naturally muted vibe. He's really dependent on the scoring on his armor to give him much in terms of color variation and visual depth. I'm not criticizing the design of the figure--it's very nice to have a big guy that's as articulate as they've made him--but the costume itself has some peculiar qualities.

Damn. I just ordered Juggernaut, but Archangel looks too expensive to me still to justify ordering. So Archangel is the only one out of the new wave that I haven't run down yet. Incidentally, Big Bad Toy Store lists the Iron Patriot/Wrecker wave as coming in July.

Yeah, it is.

As someone pointed out on another thread here, Citywalk at Universal Studios has the new wave in stock. Picked up Colossus and Kitty today. They also had Havok and a bunch of the AIM soldiers. I think someone already got their Juggernaut and Archangel.

Managed to snag a Rhino last week, as well as a Venom with the tongue sticking out. They turned out to be fine figures, though my Venom has just too straight a spine and to firm a posture. There really should have been more joints. Probably when the Daken/Venom 2-pk comes out I'll put this Venom head on that Venom body.

"I can't beleive that I don't check these boards for a day or two (computer problems at work) and miss such an exciting conversation. Hamlet, Romeo, Othello (a few references to The Prince added in)...I missed all of the Shakespeare discussion! Come on, guys, wait for the professor of literature to join in next time." I can't believe you're a professor of literature and you're logging on to your work computer to discuss comic book action figures. In more seriousness, I liked the way the conversation went, too, Wedge. But you saw what happened; a giant ball of fire appeared where the discussion had been and blew everything away. I was off my computer for 12 hours or so and when I got back the devastation was total. I'm given to understand that if we stick rigidly to topic from now on, such spontaneous combustions are unlikely to occur again. BTW, I quite enjoy the Night Thrasher custom, dude! The Daredevil is also nice, other dude!

You guys don't think Hamlet had a death wish? That duel was rigged in so many ways... "As noted in last month's issue, his mission and whole reason for joining the Dark Avengers is to #$## with the team and ultimately kill Norman Osborn." ...which seems very weak characterization to me. It makes it so at the initial stage Daken has no obvious reason for joining the Dark Avengers. Osborn's way of selling it to him is getting the opportunity to stick it to Logan by dressing up as Wolverine. Daken never pursues this. If he's on the team to mess with the heads of a bunch of super-villains and kill Osborn, what inspires him to go down that path? It's not like he goes out of his way to get on the team. My feeling is that Bendis had the idea that he joins the Dark Avengers to humiliate Logan, and that the team writing Dark Wolverine decided to go in this other direction. But they were only dealing with him once he was on the team, so they (Liu and her editor) are basically cut off from the impetus for the whole thing. They seemed to feel no need to follow up on the juicy bone Bendis threw them, and instead decided to ditch Logan for a while and instead do this whole Machiavellian storyline that is plodding its way to nowhere. The whole unfocused issue of Daken's sexuality could have been made to serve the end Bendis suggested (a kind of pseudoFreudian Eudipal drive), and give Daken a clearly-developed motivation for being with the Dark Avengers. Instead he's robbed of any natural characterization and his writers decide instead to quote "The Prince" a lot and send Daken on meaningless missions--like when he ultimately gets the Fantastic Four to owe him a favor. Was that really what Daken hoped to get out of four issues of toil and setup? He seems to think so. I think it's just rather poor writing. I don't think Liu's comic writing has achieved any sort of natural or comfortable rhythm yet--the NYX sequel was too ponderous to read more than superficially (plus it immediately undid the reasoning behind some of the most beautifully suggestive ideas in the first NYX series), and this Dark Wolverine, while full of good ideas, falls far short of what it ought to be. Daken shouldn't be a saint or a devil; in a way he is in a more ambiguous position than even Wolverine is. It's cool to have him manipulate people, since he clearly enjoys that and is so capable, but Liu likes to set him up as such a mastermind, and he's really a bit of a whelp who could swing to either side of the hero/villain scale. I think Bendis has it right here, too; Daken is impressionable, and open to improvisation. He's very new at the hero/villain game, so he shouldn't really be able to be such a constant badass. I thought Siege 2 had one of the better Daken scenes, when he tracked down Thor and Thor just fried him. Why doesn't Daken get to use his healing factor more? Part of the existential intrigue in the Wolverine family of characters (primarily meted out in the characters of Logan and Laura) is how their deep psychological pain gets played out viscerally through extreme physical suffering. Logan and Laura Kinney routinely get their flesh seared off, their limbs hacked up, bullets to the forehead, generally suffer through a whole lot of fires, from low-grade to chemical. They get poisoned, electrocuted, gutted. They get their throats ripped out. They get impaled or have their internal organs torn away. It's preposterous, of course, but these are visuals that express the depths of the pain in their souls, their unfulfilled longings, their tragedies; the pain of their existence, given visual expression. Daken doesn't get enough of any of that. His pompous sexism, his androgynous quality, his self-sufficiency--none of that brass is generally revealed to be just brass, covering up insecurity or unhappiness. And he doesn't get pummeled around the way only the Wolverine family can. As a result, he is really deprived of that deeper dimension that is the appeal of these characters. I mean, X-23 is a lame idea given incredible gravitas by writing that has been sympathetic to her and deft with her characterization. You get the sense that Kyle and Yost really want her to be an important character--they develop her slowly and surely, and they invest her with true character traits that mirror those that have given Wolverine real development. X-23 has routes to find meaning in her life, but obstacles to stop her from getting there. She has natural villains, just like Wolverine, Spider-man, or any of the A-list characters (Brian Reed kind of hit the nail on the head in the Ms. Marvel comic when Ms. Marvel admits she has no arch-enemy supervillains--if the superhero has no absolutely natural enemies, it tends to keep them from being A-list--X-23 is already close to having a rogues' gallery, and she's only been around a few years). Daken doesn't get this kind of treatment. Instead, we are told he is the modern-day Machiavellian "Prince." Really? Hard to believe, and harder to care. Earlier writing of Daken made more sense to me, but his series flies in the face of what could be fine characterization. There has yet to be the crystallizing writing that defines Daken and makes him sufficient to be a necessary character (like the Claremont/Miller miniseries did for Wolverine, or the Target X series and the whole Purifier storyline in New X-men did for Laura Kinney).

In his own comic Daken likes to hit on the male members of his team in order to make them uncomfortable. He toys with Karl Sofen in a similar way; teasing and threatening in equal measure. I think he's actually asexual; or perhaps sexually stymied in the way of Hamlet, dominated by an unbridled father figure that drains him of sexual drive. Daken uses sexuality to manipulate people, but he never closes the deal with any of them. It's hard to tell in the comics if that is simply because he is manipulating people, and nothing more, or whether he is subconsciously shying away from actual sexual situations--a Freudian kind of inability to really best his father's dominant virility. I'm not sure Marjorie Liu or the editors have this straight in their heads, either; Daken is one of the Dark Avengers that Bendis most shies away from really writing. He puts the other characters through the wringer, and fleshes out their personalities, and lets them get in scrapes and such. He keeps Daken in the background, as if the Dark Wolverine team had claimed the character and were trying to get Bendis to hold back on him. I wish they would commit a bit more on his character; this Machiavellian read of him in Dark Wolverine is getting stupid real fast. This is a manipulator who does next to nothing. With Venom and Karla Sofen it's clear why they're on the team. With the Sentry and Ares it's very clear as well. Why is Daken on the Dark Avengers? To piss his father off? That seems to have completely backfired. One would think if that were his goal Daken would be going out of his way to besmirch his dad's relatively good name, but he's acting a little like the other Dark Avengers, and trying to basically do his job. Why is he trying to fit the mold? He's definitely one of the most outright evil of the Dark Avengers, and he's not after any kind of redemption. So he just sits there thinking his teammates are all idiots, and that he hates his dad and wants to humiliate him, but he does nothing about nothing. He fights some sort of villains. He has coffee with the others at the Avengers Tower breakfast table. He bides his time. He procrastinates. Now that I think of it, this "prince" is more Hamlet than Machiavelli after all.

I'm with ya, Quasimodo; I like the Daredevil body, and I've had no problems with characters who sport it. I think the look is good for the buff characters who don't have some crazy serum flowing through their veins or a mutation or something that makes them huge.

So Secret Wars packs are back today, but it's just what they have left over from their back stock. One Iron Man/Spider Woman pack, one Spiderman/Magneto pack. Been there, done that. the estimated delivery date 4 Secret Wars wave 3 has just hours to remain accurate. Hopefully early January will see these packs out in stores!

I noticed Secret Wars packs gone from my local Targets as well. Is Target no longer carrying the item? This will be a bummer, since my local Target tended to get the new figures right as they became available.

NeoZeRo35, if you don't mind my asking, what did you use to create the shoulder patch and shore up the neck of your Destro/Red Skull? Some kind of modeling compound? I also should say it just looks righteous good. I wanted to try it myself but I didn't really have the great sense you had to re-color the jacket and buttons and such. Brilliant stuff. I think I will do an Invisible Woman that way as well. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. Your ideas are too good not to try for myself!

Hi RealOne, your Fantomex is awesome. Where is that great trenchcoat from?

Got a rockin' Colossus today in the mail. Finally my shelf is starting to look richer with mutants. Cyclops, Iceman and a few Wolverines didn't quite cut it. And I know Namor's a mutant, but he doesn't really count. How long will that guy last with the X-men nowadays? Less than a year, I'm certain. Colossus fits very well with the other figures and the face is a little more subtle than any picture I've seen has made it out to be. He is substantially-built; he has cool muscle-tone and a neat aluminum-looking paint-job. The costume is quite nicely-done, too. Stuff's starting to look good! I'm customizing a Wesley-Snipes-style Blade and I'm nearly done. I'm working on a Bastion, a Psylocke and a Leper Queen, and I have extra Cyclopses and Spiderwomen to do an Astonishing-costume Cyclops and a Jessica-Drew-Spider-woman. I am slowly working out an Orson Randall, and I plan to work a bit on buffing-up my Magneto once my extra Namor figure arrives. Aside from Jessica Drew, I'm trying to work on figures I don't think they'll get to in the series any time soon, and a couple I've seen people on the board make to spectacular effect. Trying to work out some of the New X-men, but I want a slightly shorter figure for most of them, and I'm not seeing it anywhere.

I thought maybe they shaved it off right before they changed into costumes and then grew it back immediately upon disrobing. I thought that was one of those powers they all had in common.