Finally picked up my case of First Appearance Series 4 this week after last week's delivery fiasco. All I can say is that these are the best toys that have every been made about characters that people care very little about. These figures deserve to be celebrated in their own right. There's very little to complain about here. Blue Beetle and Martian Manhunter are the stars of the wave for me. I haven't really gotten into the new BB (altho his appearance in BRAVE & BOLD #3 piqued my interest a bit and I'm now giving him a try) but this is an amazing figure. This is one of those rare toys that really looks like the character has jumped straight off the page onto your shelf. The bug thing on his back (I don't know the character well enough to know what it is) clicks on easily and looks groovy but the wings (I guess they're wings) make no sense to me and since DCD is allergic to providing any assembly instructions they're in the extraneous accessories box. He looks great as he is.
Martian Manhunter is a very fine sculpt as well. I seem to be a lone voice in quite liking his new look so as a fan of the character I'm very happy to have a figure of it. Aquaman is a fave character of mine and this version will make a nice addition to the Aquaman shelf, but I'd like it better if the orange and green bits weren't so sparkly. Not sure why they do that. Atom is a fine sculpt but the headsculpt lets it down a bit, he's a little bug-eyed. Kudos to DCD for maintaining the First Appearance Series packaging and bases, but these are missing the mini-comics previous waves came out with.
The way my LCS prices its DCD stuff it's better economy to buy the whole wave when I want 4 out of 6 so I have the Warlord and Blue Beetle variants but they're MIB as they'll be going straight to eBay. I have a buddy on a message board who says that DCD has a way of giving you what you wanted in a way that makes you wish you'd never asked for it. That's got to be the case with this Warlord figure. Fans have been clamouring for a Travis Morgan figure for years and we get a rebooted version of the character whose series lasted a whole 10 issues. Argh. The Blue Beetle "Stealth Variant" has to get the prize for the most meaningless variant ever. We don't know this character well enough to want two of him for pete's sake!
Okay, now to the bitching. DCD has to be given it's due for producing an excellent wave of figures, but as I said in the last post, PLEASE can we have this quality for characters that really matter?? Imagine where DCD's credibility would be right now if JSA Wave 1 was done at this standard? (I know I hark on about JSA Wave One but it bloody well deserves to be harked on about. Three words: Golden. Age. Atoms.)
What ires me most is that we get nothing from Brewer to acknowledge any of this. Recently Art Asylum had a very rare scale issue with it's excellent Star Trek range and they acknowledged it. Some fans were pretty upset about the issue but being given an explanation of why it happened and what steps were being taken to prevent it happening again helps to restore confidence. If anything ever deserved a public acknowledgement it's the Atoms debacle, and what do we get? Oxygen.
So thanks for this great wave DCD. It puts a little in the bank, but nothing near as much as trying to show that you're listening would.
1 comment:
Nice analysis of this wave. You're right, these figures look great, but you gotta draw the line somewhere, and there's lots of characters coming out in May that I actually DO want (Animal Man, Booster, etc) as opposed to these flash-in-the-pans.
I did pick up Warlord, however, for its great sculpt, and the fact DCD hasn't done anything with him yet. (Boo to the spear design-it broke coming out of the box). But everything else was just superfluous. Though I agree Blue Beetle's B&B appearance also piqued my interest.
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