Toy Review: Dawn

09/17/09

Dawn from McFarlane Toys

I’ve never been a big fan of McFarlane toys. Their product is often touted as “action” figures but they’ve always been far from it. Many can’t even boast of the simple 5 point joint system your old school He-Man figures used to have, and the joints they do have are often swivels that add nothing to a figures poseablility. They are essentially made to be displayed in one pose and one pose only.

That being said, this figure, based on Joseph Michael Linsner’s Dawn character has been on my want list since I first saw it on a 2008 filmschoolrejects.com list of the 10 Hottest Female Action Figures. Even if the figure was released back in 1999, the sculpt is still one of the best that any company has ever produced in this scale.

Like a lot of the figures in my collection, I don’t know a hell of a lot about the character Dawn. According to Wikipedia (how the hell did we do research before Wikipedia?), she is a comic character who first appeared in 1989 and is supposed to be a representation of the goddess of rebirth. There’s a whole lot of malarkey that follows about how Dawn is every woman and every woman is beautifyl, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum. I skipped over it and decided there was a better way to find out about her. According to a Google Image Search (how on earth did we find pictures without the Google Image Search?), she’s a buxom lingerie model who likes swords.

The McFarlane statuette naturally leans toward to latter description. She is dressed in a green backless body suit, with gloves, boots and a skirt. It’s a pretty great look and there are excellent details to her costume and armor. I really love the vac-metalized belt she’s wearing, even if the process is notorious for chipping over time. It simply looks great.

Paint on the one I found was perfect as far as I could see. This may not be the case for all examples since I bought mine from a McFarlane collector at the recent Metro Comic Con. He most likely bought the best figure he could find. I hear very little about quality control issues about McFarlane so I imagine that there aren’t many problems on this toy’s production run.

As mentioned, articulation is crap. She’s got a ball jointed (if I’m not mistaken) neck that is useless because of her hair, shoulder swivels, elbow swivels, wrist swivels, angled thigh swivels, and one more set of swivels at the top of her boots. None of these are particularly useful except for perhaps the arm articulation which allows for her to gesture or hold the included sword in a couple of ladylike poses (I mean that “couple”; there are two poses only).

The accessories are minimal and are all really part of the base she comes with. There is a sword, a demon skull, a rose and vine, a pair of Greek theater masks, a weird tree trunk/stump thing with wings, and the asphalt base. I’m sure these items all have something to do with the story, but as I haven’t read the book, I couldn’t tell you their significance. They all look great though.

So there’s the good and the bad… and then there’s the pervy. The whole front of her costume is translucent. That’s right. It’s see-through. The sculpt underneath is even anatomically correct. Bewbs.

If you’ve been collecting action figures for any amount of time, you know that the female toys are always the ones that look the weirdest, which is why if you want a nice one, you need to shell out for statuettes like this one. No she doens’t have a hell of a lot of articulation, but the beautiful sculpt, the great looking accessories, and the fact that it’s an obscure character that doesn’t get a lot of attention (and hence doens’t warrant insane eBay prices) make this figure a good buy. I got mine at P900.00 loose which is less than a new figure from NECA, so if you can find one around that price I’d suggest picking it up.