fantastic_four

Plus it's baked into the concept of the animal he's named after since wolverines are small but fierce. Honey badgers are more fierce, but Hulk vs. Honey Badger doesn't ring as quite as bad-arse of a fight.

Also, I mostly keep figures in the bags because I prefer my displayed ones to only be in action poses. So my plan has been to keep most of them stored and as many as will fit into my display cases out, and I periodically swap them in and out of storage as I set up new poses. What actually happens is I set up a pose, my kids see the figures in the action poses, and they immediately want to play with the figures that are posed. I haven't been able to keep a pose up for a single shelf in my display cases for more than a day so far, so my cases are almost always empty or just have figures laying around randomly after my kids raided the pose.

Meant to say this the other day, but I am so disillusioned with all of the Marvel Legends Wolverine figures because the claws are absolutely stupid. Even if you heat them up and straighten them, 90% of the time they still get out of alignment and look like the picture below. I hadn't thought of it until I got both figures, but this claw design works SIGNIFICANTLY better on X-23 because she only has two claws, so if one or the other is splayed out you barely notice it, but when there are three any one that gets out of alignment looks bad next to the other two. Note in the X-23 pic below the left hand claws are off at angles, but it barely matters, all you have to do is point them away from each other in some way and it looks fine.

Got my figure bags in last week and got everything in them. REALLY glad I went with 4 mil thickness, they slide over each other and stack incredibly well with no danger even when I put the bigger figures onto the smaller ones, although I do keep any that are over a pound towards the bottom and my two 20" sentinels are at the bottom of this box. Not feeling much need for separate accessory bags yet.

We have no idea if this is human trafficking up through this episode. I'm still betting that the Hoyt we heard on the phone towards the end of episode 7 is Julie's father and that he wanted her to help replace his daughter's lost husband and daughter from the car accident revealed in episode 7 since they both died in 1977 and the kidnapping/murder happened in 1980, but who knows, it's fairly wide open as to why he wanted her.

Days of Future Past was very good, and so was the second X-Men film. The first X-Men film was fine, and compared to everything that came before it was SPECTACULAR...it only doesn't hold up as much in retrospect since it launched the new age of superhero films.

Here's the origin page for his name, followed by the page where Apocalypse gives him his powers. Both pages are from "The Further Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix" issue 3 from 1996.

He's a human and an evolutionary biologist who was a contemporary of Charles Darwin who believes mutants are an improvement upon humanity. He learned about Apocalypse, woke him up, and after the death of Sinister's wife Apocalypse genetically manipulated him to have an array of powers that are effectively a mix of Jean Grey, Mystique, and Wolverine. His name comes from his attempt to bring his dead son back to life...he asked his wife for forgiveness on her deathbed, but she said "to me, you are... utterly… and contemptibly… sinister!" He took his name from her last words to him. His obsession with and direct ties to the history of humanity's understanding of evolution are what I find interesting about him. Both he and Apocalypse could be done well in film, Bryan Singer just didn't cover enough of the back story to make En Sabah Nur compelling.

Supposedly, but how could he know that for sure? I assume it's just something he tells people that he doesn't know for sure.

That's part of what fascinates me about him, his power set has grown so huge over the millennia that he really should be close to god-like. Love that concept, and love the ties to the dawn of human civilization, particularly ancient Egypt.

Isn't it hard to make sense of them because they're extraordinarily complex due to the extreme amount of time he's spent absorbing the powers of other mutants over the millennia?

I thought the writer on on X-Factor #5 and #6 was Louise Simonson, penciller was Jackson Guice, and the inker was Bob McLeod. I would assume Guice was responsible for the visual elements, but who knows how they interacted, it could have been either or both.

One other thing I saw somewhere--someone at the Toy Fair commented that the alternate Cap head looked to be styled on Sal Buscema's art for Cap from the 1970s. I couldn't find a clear picture of it so I'm not sure myself.

Bro... It was 1986. Have you see what else was going on that year ? Yep. If I didn't know better, I'd think Rob Liefeld made all those dumb visual design decisions, but I think it was Jackson Guice who pencilled him first in X-Factor. As you implied, it was a time when artists were making dumb character design decisions all over the place.

Picked the 10th Anniversary movie Ultron up at Best Buy today during lunch on clearance at $13; he's the one in the middle in the pic below. Had been debating between that and the classic appearance on the Marvel Select visible on the left and just couldn't decide, so I think I might get the Select too eventually. Ultron hops from body to body and often controls multiple drones and or versions of his main body anyway so any display can work with both.

I feel compelled to rant about Apocalypse a bit more. I can think of no better example of a comic book character written EXTREMELY well that is more horribly executed by the artist than Apocalypse. Why's he got tubes connecting his arms to his legs? Guess what--nobody knows! The artist just stuck it in there because he thought it jazzed up the look. OK, so he's a mutant, and his lips look weird, I can buy that. But those lips on the character aren't organic, they're metallic. WTF? As far as I can tell there are NO explanations for why the original artist made these bizarre visual choices that seem to be functional yet serve no actual function.

People said that on Fwoosh, and then someone pointed out that the lighter-blue Cap was later in the 70s and 80s and he was darker earlier. I don't have much preference myself. You can see on the two scans below (or most I find via Google image search) that his outfit does look dark on Cap #1 and #100.

Is it possible to explain why Apocalypse would have a dumb claw on his hand? If I ever buy the figure--which I really, really want to do because I love him in theory, but probably never will because of the lips and the dumb "A"--why would I ever replace his fist with that claw? What the heck would he do with that thing?

Yea I nabbed that the first few hours it was up. I don't like this Scarlet Witch as much as the one from 2015, but the Magneto is the best to date, and Quicksilver looks great, so I'm looking forward to it.

Afraid your dad will think collecting action figures means you're stuck in a childlike mental state and that he must have failed as a parent, eh? Your girlfriend is probably keeping a count in her head of your net financial worth that she balances against your emotional, intellectual, and physical value. Every new purchase or sale means she has to update your financial worth and re-balance your overall value to her.

I've heard all three come with alternate heads that aren't styled like Alex Ross, so it may not matter if you like the body sculpt and classic painting. Cap and Iron Man definitely have the non-Ross heads, but they didn't have the Thor box at the fair so nobody's sure about him yet. I like the look of the Cap body more than any other I've seen and will likely get that, too. Iron Man has the dumb original "iron muscles" I hate, but otherwise the sculpt and paint look great, so I'd pick him up on clearance if I can.

I rarely watch them all the way through more than once, but I go back and watch the best fight scenes a LOT. I only watch the REALLY good ones all the way through multiple times. Examples of ones I watch in their entirety a lot are The Dark Knight, Batman Begins, Logan, Iron Man, and Spider-Man 2. Most others I just watch the highlights. Yea I'm probably buying Archangel too, I've had him and the new Gambit in my cart since the site went up on Friday but am waiting until the end to pull the trigger to mull over everything I want. Not sure I want Beast yet...he looks amazing, but I'm not in love with the character. I never liked it when they gave him the blue fur. I've debated over Archangel for two months now...I love the idea of Apocalypse and the four horsemen, but that character has always been ruined for me by his dumb appearance. What's up with his lips, or the big, dumb "A" on his belt? I wince EVERY time I see that "A"...there is just no way a 10,000 year old dude is going to have a costume that vain and that dumb. I'm eternally torn by the coolness of the character mixed with the abject stupidity of his visual design that him and everything about him--which in our current context is Archangel--is tainted for me. But meh, those Archangel wings look really bad-arse, so I'll probably get it. Or remove him from my cart and just get Gambit.

I hate you. I pre-ordered a skiff just in case. You hate me? What, are you out of space in your house, money, or both? Either way, sounds like compelling evidence that action figures should be classified as a Schedule 1 drug by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Oh, and my favorite Marvel Legends reveals from the past weekend's Toy Fair are the Alex Ross Thor, Nightcrawler, Silver Samurai, Colossus, and the Magneto/Scarlet Witch/Quicksilver 3-pack. I had been passing on Thor waiting for a great classic version, and this one looks like absolute perfection in every way--except perhaps scaling, he looks to be scaled at 7 feet tall in the pictures whereas the comic version is 6' 6" and Chris Hemsworth is 6' 3", waiting on the final figure to see for sure if they oversized him. The Wolverine and Hulk combo pack looks interesting too, but I'm not buying duplicates unless reviewers tell me that one or both are better than existing versions. The Magneto 3-pack is an Amazon exclusive that's already up for pre-order and I did pre-order that one. The first appearance styling of Wolverine does look pretty great. Hulk looks better than any other one I've seen, but meh, I'm not a big Hulk fan, so he'd have to be revolutionary to buy him. He does have butterfly joints in his shoulders, and that might be enough, I'll wait for articulation video reviews to decide. I like the look of Mr. Sinister, but I'm not familiar enough with the character yet to have attachment to him, he first appeared while I was in college and barely paying attention to comics. There's a new Cyclops that is VERY cool because he has optic blast effects with him, but he's wearing the X-Force costume I hate so I doubt I get him. I'm very curious if the classic Colossus will be better than the Select Colossus. The styling and paint looks just as good, and he looks a little beefier which I like, and the articulation is almost certainly better, so I bet I end up getting him, but wow, I SO love the Select Colossus, Hasbro has to really nail it for me to move on from that version.

For modern collectors--this past Friday Hasbro put up a new web site to buy toys directly from them. Lots of figures currently in stock, lots up for pre-order, and the pictures they have of everything up there are VERY high resolution and present better than product images on any other web site that sells Hasbro toys. They also offer free shipping if you become a "premium" member, and if you buy anything on the site between today and Friday you automatically become a premium member for the rest of the year. I'm guessing this is where I buy all my Marvel Legends from now on. https://hasbropulse.com/ Interestingly one of the pre-order items that I assume was announced at this past weekend's New York Toy Fair is a Return of the Jedi vehicle for $40. They just finished the huge barge of Jabba, and this is one of the smaller skiffs that flew around the larger barge, it's the one where they were trying to shove Luke, Han, Lando, and Chewie into the Sarlacc pit from and where Luke and Boba Fett fought. I guess they created both the huge Haslab barge and this smaller skiff at the same time. I assume they're both in the same scale, but I'm not sure of it. https://hasbropulse.com/collections/preorders/products/star-wars-the-vintage-collection-episode-vi-return-of-the-jedi-jabbas-tatooine-skiff-vehicle