Toy Review: Secret Wars Doctor Doom & Absorbing Man

04/2/10

Doctor Doom & Absorbing Man

I’ve had a lot of luck with the Marvel Universe series. Sure, I’m on forum boards constantly and happen to work near several toy stores which I’m able to check them every few days, but there’s still a lot of chance involved. Toy stores don’t have a regular day for re-stocking shelves so it’s hit or miss. Unless you’ve got an in with reps at your local store, of course. Some have implemented policies to prevent opportunistic sellers from taking advantage of sales people and hoarding hard to find product while leaving the dregs for regular consumers. That’s a good thing, but it still change the fact that small timers like us still need old fashioned hard work when it comes to finding our figures.

Like the Hawkeye and Thor 2-packs, I found the Secret Wars Doctor Doom and Absorbing Man set in Toy Kingdom. This time I was in Podium, one of my favorite spots; they tend to get their shipments a few days after the Toy Kingdom in Megamall. When I came in some kids and their dad were shopping. He had a whole row of Marvel Universe figures lined up on a shelf and was letting the kids each pick one. The new Secret Wars 2-Packs were among the ones they were choosing from.

One of the kids choose a Doctor Doom, but the other went back on the shelf. Score!

I miss the included comics in Marvel toy lines. I used to enjoy reading them whenever I got a new Marvel Legends figure, so I’m glad that they’ve brought them back. The packaging still leaves me cold, though. Hasbro doesn’t seem to put a lot of effort into graphic design when it comes to their Marvel licenses.

The plastic shell is still as easy to open as ever though. You just need to cut along the sides and pop out the figures. Just watch out that you don’t cut yourself on the edge of the plastic (yes, I’ve done it) or accidently lose something when you pull out the plastic tray (done that, too).

It was Absorbing Man who I was really after when I heard about this set. He’s not really the one that most collectors would want, but I’m a Hulk fan more than I am a Fantastic Four fan. The Hulk doesn’t have a very wide rogues gallery so when one arrives, I don’t dick around.

Sadly, this version of Carl “Crusher” Creel is a downer. His superpower, granted to him by Loki through Asgardian magic, is to absorb the properties of anything he touches; if he grabs an oil tanker, he becomes iron and steel and pees petroleum. If he grabs a building, his body, clothes and his wrecking ball weapon become concrete and brick and shits… well, bricks. He also has the ability to absorb the properties of energy, which means he can feed off the Hulk’s gamma radiation and go head to head with Banner. Even if he’s originally a Thor baddie, I still remember him as a Hulk villian.

In the 6″ version released in 2008 with the Fin Fang Foom Marvel Legends wave, they tried to simulate this power by making his arm of stone and his leg of brick, with the appropriate textures cut into the plastic. It was a fairly neat looking way to do it and worked sufficiently well even without any heavy paint applications. In this version they over simplified things and just just gave his left arm a splotchy coat of dark gray paint.

Hasbro Fail.

I realize times are tough and corners have to be cut, but this is just pitiful. There are no sculpted details on his arm to make it feel like anything near cement or mud or whatever the substance he is supposed to have absorbed is. It’s just smooth plastic like his right arm, with that dull paint splashed on.

The rest of the sculpt saves the figure somewhat, especially the head. I’m sure they’ve reused someone’s body for Carl (I don’t have enough universe figures to make that determination), but the head’s all his. He’s got this amazing looking scowl on him that just screams “previously incarcerated” to me. The body is appropriately ripped for a convict and he’s not wearing tights for a change. The pants are a sticking point. He’s got the same kind of oversized hips as the Luke Cage figure. It’s ugly and you’d think with the size of them they could have fit a ball-post joint there somewhere.

They did at least include a nice tread on the sole of his shoes. That’s more than can be said for most super heroes or villians. How do these guys get any traction?

The articulation isn’t all that great, mostly because of the unbelieveably bad hips that Marvel Universe toys share. The ball-socket crotchbar construction worked alright on the vintage GI Joe toys, but we’re way beyond that already. There are better designs that allow much more natural posing options. So far, only the new Thor has the extra thigh cut that makes the ball-socket scheme work.

In addition, the old crotch bars were made of metal, which were sturdier than the plastic ones. These plastic ones are subject to tiny flaws that leads to quality issues. My Silver Surfer’s legs keep coming off because of it and I’m afraid to get another.

Because of the sub-par hip articulation, Absorbing Man can’t really balance with out a stand because he can’t put both feet flat on the ground. Sad because he has pretty wide feet that would make a perfect platform.

The fact that he can’t hold his wrecking ball weapon also pisses me off. His right hand is sculpted way to wide and the material is soft, so the chaing just falls right out. Argh.

Doctor Doom, on the other hand, is a great figure, easily among the top 3 that I’ve seen in the Marvel Universe line. I was supposed to be splitting this with Bim of Comicology, but he found one of the sets around the same time I did, and I didn’t inform him that I’d found one in time. Facepalm.

This figure is amazing. The amount of effort that went into this figure, considering it’s scale, is staggering. Just looking at his cape will tell you the trouble the toy designers went through here. And it’s removable! you just need to pop off his head and slide it off the neck. His hood is molded on, though, and you can’t remove his mask. They do make up for it by giving him jets on his back and sculpting them into his feet as well. Makes for more “realistic” “flying”.

Victor’s face mask is a little slimmer than the Marvel Legends version, and a the head is little taller. It’s not a bad change, and I think it makes the figure look more a bit more imposing.

The lines on his armor are all cut into the plastic, rather than just painted on. He has his belt and holster, and they’re in perfect scale for the figure. All the joints work as they should, and the skirt is soft enough to allow some posing while hiding the ball-socket hips (though their construction is the same as all the other Marvel Universe figures).

He comes with 2 accessories, 3 if you count the aforementioned cape. The first is his gun. I guess it might be his Antimatter Extrapolator, or his Cosmic-Beam Gun, or his Entropic Inducer. Or it could just be a regular Mauser C96, which would be an odd choice since from what I’ve read that was a pretty crappy pistol. In any case, the gun doesn’t fit in the holster, unlike the one on the Bucky Cap and Union Jack. It’s also sad that it doesn’t fit the hand either. The firearm tends to fall out very easily, so you’ll spend time putting it back in his palm.

The hand can also hold the other accessory; a tiny Wasp figurine. Originally, I thought “wow! It’s like getting 3 figures for the price of 2!” and I imagine there are other collectors thinking the same thing, but this thing isn’t all that great. It’s shaped vaguely like a woman with one hand up in the air and the other held close to her chest, with wings, but there isn’t any detail, either sculpted or painted on. Sure this is a tiny figure and this is a mass market release, but I’m of the mind that if you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all.

Plus, you can’t really do anything with her. There’s no stand included, and no hook on the back in case you want to stick her on the wall. She’s sculpted as if flying, but if you want her to actually look like she is, you’ll need to jerry-rig something yourself. To quote one of my lazy friends. “who has that kind of time?”

So buy it? Or not? Like most of the Secret Wars 2-packs, this one’s half hit, half miss.

Sculpt and quality wise, I’d say flat out that Doom is the best Marvel Universe figure that Hasbro has made so far, and from now on, he is my benchmark for all other figures in the line. There isn’t anything really wrong with him that I can figure out.

Except the fact that he’s paired with Absorbing Man.

It’s not that Absorbing Man is a bad figure, but putting him next to Doom just emphasizes the fact that the Php 900 asking price for the set is just not in proportion to it’s value. Sure you get some accessories, but you can’t really count the cape, and unless you’re a hardcore Avengers collector, Wasp doesn’t have much play value. That leaves you with 2 accessories, and one of them is a tiny gun that doesn’t fit anywhere. The comic is a nice bonus, but let’s face it, all of us would prefer a cheaper price tag than we would a “free” comic.

Doom is just too good a figure to pass up, FOR A COLLECTOR. If you’re not a collector of the Marvel Universe line, I’d say this pack won’t convince you to buy into it. And definitely not at the price the figures are at now. Even at the new lower price of Php 450.00 per figure, I’m not convinced that this line is an improvement over the Marvel Legends toys, or even the vintage Toy Biz ones.