Non-Bot Reviews: Marvel Legends (6-Inch) Amazing Fantasy Spider-Man

Previously, on Non-Bot Reviews!!! I’d read a Penguin Classics collection of early Spider-Man comics while on vacation, and liked them enough that it motivated me to buy a small Retro Collection Spider-Man figure based on his earliest, slightly-different appearances in those really entertaining Stan Lee/Steve Ditko yarns. Not to beat around the bush, but it turned out that it wasn’t a very good figure, and was overpriced and poorly engineered for what you got. I didn’t mention it at the time, but I’d had a problem with the Penguin Classics book, too. Not the stories, they’re great fun, but with the fact that the collection was abridged, and would skip over entire issues (sometimes multiple ones, even) in lieu of text summaries, when I wanted to read a full run, warts and all. Well, since then, I’ve upgraded that book by grabbing an Omnibus edition, reprinting the full Stan Lee/Steve Ditko run (it’s costly and huge, but I had birthday giftcards to make it happen). And, on the action figure side, I also upgraded the Retro figure to the larger model.

See, it’s Spider-Man’s 60th anniversary, so there’s a bunch of special Marvel Legends coming out, including this first-appearance one, called “Amazing Fantasy Spider-Man,” like the smaller one, named after the anthology book his debut story appeared in. Now, I’m not much of a 6-inch collector, but I used to own a few Marvel Legends, specifically a bunch of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 movie figures. At the time, I found them a bit lacking, honestly. I didn’t like the rubbery plastic, the stiff articulation, the ugly looking pinned-in joints, and I eventually sold them off and dropped the micro-hobby because of it. But that was something like five years ago (cripes…), and I’ve heard Marvel Legends in general have gotten better, plus this specific one looked really nice, so I decided to give it a try, and see how Hasbro 6-Inch Technology has advanced.

The Sculpt

Spider-Man’s about the same height as my other 6-inch-ish figures, a motley assortment that includes some Samuses Aran, a Star Wars Black Series Luke Skywalker, and some Zelda characters. In Transformers terms, he’s a little under Voyager height, but a lot skinnier.

So, Marvel Legends re-use tooling a lot, which makes sense, since one musclebound superhero is often very similar to the next, but I know that a pair of selling points with this specific figure are that a) he’s an entirely new, bespoke tooling (presumably lots of re-uses will follow), and, b) he’s “pin-free,” meaning his joints don’t have the kind of ugly cut-out circles around them that older Legends figures (And my Black Series Luke) did.

And yeah, he’s pretty good looking. The deco is doing a lot of the work, but beneath that, you have a musclebound male body that’s not 90’s levels of jacked, but definitely on the higher end of Toned Athletic Strong Guy.

I kind of wish he actually had less muscle definition, since the Ditko illustrations he’s referencing really just made him look like A Normal, Skinny Guy in a suit rather than an athlete, something the smaller Retro figure was a little better at imitating. On the other hand, if this is going to be a base for many figures going forward, I can see why they’d opt for something less specific, and more muscled.

Of course, the sculpt’s also lousy with joint cuts, but he couldn’t exist without them, and when it’s Just A Guy and not a robot, or an armored character like Samus, it’s pretty much impossible to hide them, so it is what it is.

Up top, Spider-Man’s head’s really nice, and like the smaller Retro guy, the eyes are sculpted in, and aren’t just paint. What I particularly appreciate here is that the sculpt is shaped a bit differently from the modern, standard Spider-Man look, with squintier eyes and specific head shaped to make him look like the Ditko illustrations, which is a big upgrade over the Retro one’s straight repainting of a “default” Spider-noggin.

The Colors

So, 90 percent of this Spider-Man is just two colors: Black and red. It’s funny, looking at the actual vintage art, I’m not entirely unconvinced he wasn’t always supposed to have dark blue on his suit, and it just wasn’t conveyed very well through the colors until a few issues in. But whether this is truly accurate, or just imitating the idiosyncrasies of limited Marvel colors a la Masterpiece King Grimlock, it’s a good look. Like I said with the Retro figure, I just like the red and black more than red and blue, it’s slicker. It helps that this feels like a darker, more burnt-looking red than the typically more vibrant red he has, too.

Spider-Man may be almost entirely two colors, but there’s a lot of interplay between them. All his webbing across his suit is painted on, he’s got the spider-logo on his chest, and an inverted red one on his back, among other things. I have found a couple paint blemishes as I go, dabs of black on red and a couple red specks on the black, but they’re pretty minor (and I can probably Gundam Marker over the red ones, at least).

The only other color is a bit of white inside his squinty eyes, which is really all he needs

I’m gonna be a turbo-nerd here, and point out that this deco isn’t technically “Amazing Fantasy” Spider-Man. In that debut story, he had a blue spider-logo on his back (like the smaller Retro figure), this is actually “Issue #1” Spider-Man, that version had the red logo on the back.

But like, who cares, the two tones look better anyway, and “Amazing Fantasy” sounds better than “Second Appearance.”

Build Quality

This was a big issue for me with the crop of Marvel Legends I had a few years ago. Starlord and his friends had a kind of cheap feeling to them, and the Luke that I still have also kind of has that vibe. Part of it is the kind of rubbery plastic a lot of the fleshier bits are made of, along with those pinned joints, and other small things.

I will say, this guy immediately feels more solid, and more substantial than I remember those feeling, and more sturdy than Luke. Ultimately, though, Spider-Man still doesn’t feel like he’s made out of the same rigid materials as my various other high-end 6-inchers (not that I’d expect him to be, given the price difference), or even most Transformers (that one I can’t explain). There’s a bit of softness to him, a bit of give, though the whole thing is still less rubbery-feeling than the older guys, and is especially sturdy compared to the outright gummy extremities of the Retro figure. I think him being just a Suit Person with no fleshy features helps obfuscate it a bit.

It does help that he can stand real good, too, he’s a very stable figure, which is great, because he doesn’t have a back-plug to give him a figure stand, though he does have holes in his feet.

Accessories and Features

I’ll save articulation for last this time, for storytelling purposes. First, what else is in the box? A big pile of swappable hands, for one thing. They include fists, splayed-open hands (for wall-crawling), devil-horns web-shooting hands, and accessory-gripping hands.

They attach and detach from his wrists easily, on a flared peg that pops on and off after a squeeze. They’re sturdy enough to stay attached, but loose enough to be easy hotswaps. It’s all you could ask for, and the four sets of hands cover The Range of Spider-Man Emotions pretty well.

Next, he’s got a web accessory. It’s a long line, cast in milky translucent plastic, and is super-soft. Like the tentacles on the Quintesson Judge, it’s the kind of material that’s very flexible, but holds its shape once you let go.

One end is a hoop, the other ends on a little spiral. You can grip the hoop in his hand, and have him swing it like a whip, or pretend it’s attached to something….

or you can take the riskier approach, wrap the spiral end around his hand, and try and dangle him from something, like a nail in the wall.

The last big thing is his armpit-webs. The smaller Retro figure failed at rendering them in plastic, by making them fused to his forearms, only “working” when he was posed ramrod-straight. This version does them via two pairs of accessories, and they…kind of half-work?

They don’t entirely do the job, but they’re better than the little guy. Basically he has tiny holes in the undersides of his upper arms that they peg into, though it’s kind of a tricky fit, they needed breaking in and would initially fall out easily. He has two sets: Smaller, folded webs, and longer “extended” ones.

The smaller ones look best when his arms are at rest, and kind of look odd when his arms are spread out, but definitely less weird then the Retro figure. The spread ones, meanwhile, look best when he’s got his arms up, but often look bad from behind, just kind of hanging off his back, unless you do some really specific poses.

But the important, key thing, is that they’re optional parts, and you can just leave them off of him. Ditko would forget to draw them all the time, and part of me wonders if future illustrators dropped them later on because they were impossible to render on action figures.

During my research, for example, I found out that there was an older Marvel Legend attempt at this design that used a “cape” of cloth goods to do it, which looked pretty dodgy, too.

It’s just not something you can easily translate into physical space, and this is the best attempt by default, especially since you can just leave them off.

Articulation

Here’s the biggest thing about this guy, the star of the show to me. I’m back and forth on whether or not poseability “qualifies” as a gimmick in some cases, but here, yeah, it’s a gimmick, especially since Spider-Man’s known for being drawn in all kinds of bent, acrobatic poses. It’s been a gimmick since the olden days, when there were Toybiz Spider-Men where “Super-Poseable” was the callout feature.

And this guy brings the bendiness, coming with just a sheer, ludicrous amount of joints, with a big range of motion to a lot of them. He’s got stuff like omni-directional ankles, double knees, two sets of swivels per leg, hips that go faaaarrr, an insane double-ab-crunch, wrists that swivel AND dip, double elbows, bicep swivels, and two entire neck joints.

I feel like his shoulders should be able to raise higher, though? They’re a bit blocked and limited. That, and he doesn’t have a “proper” waist joint, relying on the ab crunch at his solar plexus having side-to-side motion instead. That’s about it in terms of obvious limitations.

I took down my Metroid Prime 3 Samus Figma to directly compare them, and he’s got almost the same number of joints as her. Samus has toe-joints on her feet that Spidey lacks, and Samus eschews mid-limb joint cuts in the name of adding more rotation to her “natural” joints (elbows, knees, etc.), but other than that, they’re the exact same. In some ways, Pete’s got her beat, when you consider how *far* some of his joints, like his hips and torso, can bend, though being unencumbered by armor probably has more to do with it.

The one downside to his bendiness is that the lines of his suit get broken up really easily, especially around his arms, and, despite the pinless sculpt, extending some joints really far, like his shoulders, exposes clashing colors, but that’s the cost to so many joints, and it feels worth it.

Above all else, he’s just *fun* to bend and flex, and pose, and he can do all kinds of squatting, leaping, and replicating of comic panels. Critically, the fact that he’s made out of slightly “cheaper” materials than my more higher-end stuff means I’m not afraid to knock him around, and bend and flex him. It combines with the sculpt, and especially the hands, to capture the character’s personality well, and more importantly, captures the inherent funniness in Spider-Man existing in non-superhero situations.

Overall

This guy’s a lot of good, clean fun. It’s a character I like rendered in a specific design from stories I like, as well as just being a good-looking aesthetic. He’s incredibly bendy, looks great, has great accessories, and is fun to noodle with.

There’s very little wrong here. Sure, the underarm webs don’t work very well, but you can just leave them off, and how they’re done here is probably the best possible way to handle them. Other than that, the closest things to a complaint I have is how his material construction is a bit short of the high-end stuff I collect, but like…….he’s 42 Canadian dollars, that’s not on the level with those guys, and he comes with the same insane articulation and features as those pricier guys. I don’t know if this is a blanket recommendation of all current Marvel Legends, but this one sure came out good.

If anything, he makes me wish I had more 6-inch scale figures. I generally prefer the smaller Star Wars/G.I. Joe scale, for shelf space and for the fact that you can squint test them to fit with most Transformers. Though this guy technically fits with Kingdom’s Beast Wars guys, I suppose.

Anyway, this guy’s amazingly fun, and I recommend him if you want a Spider-Man figure that’s in this scale, or just a fun standalone 6-inch super-guy. The only reason not to get this specific one would be because he’s a “variant” design, but I expect this body’s going to get re-released and repainted a bunch anyway (the “Renew Your Vows” one that’s also currently on shelves is a different tooling, but there’s already a 90’s Cartoon Spider-Man redeco of this specific figure on the way).

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