Iron Man the Iron Avenger
Hulkbuster
Oh, Iron Man. Why can’t I quit you?
Iron Man is the most expensive part of my collection. Despite there being dozens of X-men or Transformers that I consider myself a fan of, Iron Man with his insane armory sucks up the majority of my money.
I’ve mentioned how Hasbro makes the most of a Transformer toy mold by re-coloring it and selling it off as a new character. It’s a love/hate kind of thing for some fans. Personally, I love the fact that I’ve got the chance to complete, say, the Seekers, but I hate the fact that I, as a collector, cannot resist the urge to do so and that it costs me around Php 4,000.00 ($89 US), local retail.
Iron Man is even worse. He’s a superhero who has a cavernous room filled with hundreds of different suits of armor, each fit for a certain situation. He alone among the pantheon of Marvel Superheroes can support the same kind of mold re-use that Hasbro heaps upon Transformers fans. Sure, Hulk also has had a lot of different variations (Grey, Green, Smart, War, Tanooki, etc.), but each one of those requires a different mold. I’ve got around 20 6″ Hulk toys and they’re isn’t really a straight re-use among them (there may be a few kit bashes and some with new heads, but we’re not counting them).
Other heroes may also have one or two costumes that you can fudge with a simple alternate deco, but nothing on the same scale. With Iron man, it’s not uncommon for a figure to be used 4 or 5 times by simply releasing it with a new color scheme and extra accessories (also re-issued from other figures). This is the case with the recent Iron Man: the Iron Avenger Hulkbuster.
This was included in first wave of the 6″ Iron Man: the Iron Avenger line, which also included a re-issued Movie War Machine and Mark VI, and one new figure, Titanium Man, which is based on the comic appearance of the character.
The Hulkbuster is one of those “Concept” armors, a term used since the first Iron Man movie toys to describe armor suits that are not really from either the movie or comic continuity. For the most part, these are all re-colors of previously released figures and the rules haven’t changed since then. This figure is a re-colored version of the Heavy Artillery suit from the first movie:
Image mirrored from http://gofigureactionfigures.com
The new colors stick pretty closely to the standard Iron Man hues of red and gold. It’s a good distribution of tones, but it’s not as visually interesting as any of the the other three versions we’ve seen (the aforementioned Heavy Artillery, the Arctic Crusader, and Subterranean armors). Or it could be that I’m just jaded from seeing these same colors on everything since that first wave of movie figures back in 2008.
From that early 2008 movie line to last year’s Iron Man 2 line, the biggest problem with these red and gold figures is the paint. Not only are the colors applied like they were finger painted by an epileptic 3-year old on crack, the red paint itself is often tacky, which means that it coverage isn’t always even beneath the final top coat, and the gold paint fades in a matter of months.
It comes with a few accessories; a new helmet that fits over the smaller helmet and attaches to the collar of his super suit. It’s held on by friction, but it locks in like a bastard, so you ought to be ok. He also comes with a re-colored backpack like the one that came with the Heavy Artillery armor. It’s a happily half-assed piece of work that has 4 appendages, 3 that don’t really look like guns at all. The last of the 4 legs on the backpack is another one of those silly rocket launcers that pops another of those blue fireballs you always see with Hasbro figures.
The sculpt of the figure itself is sweet, looking like a huge, hulking robot. Since he’s so much bigger than the other 6″ Iron Man, he doesnt’ suffer from the Frankensteinian assembly that Hasbro tends foist on us with the rest of the line (e.g. the new Iniative War Machine). The result is a toy that looks cohesive. Solid.
His articulation is fairly good for something this size. The bulk of the body does tend to hinder movement, but you can get some fairly wide stances out of him, and his upper arm movement is pretty good. I do hate that he has no usefull ankle movement. A rocker joint there would have allowed the figure to remain much more stable when.
He is MUCH smaller than the old Marvel Legends Hulkbuster from Toy Biz. That one had a much nicer design, with a flatter helmet. The one that this one sports is tall and narrow. It really looks odd at first, but it began to grow on me as soon as I got it open.
Really, this thing isn’t a must have (if I had to give it a pass/fail grade, I’d thumb it down), but the awesomeness of the original design, the fact that it’s another Iron Man armor in a scale I thought dead, and the hot rod color scheme all combine to make me happy that I picked it up.
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Slangards
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