The second Marvel Legends wave to tie in with Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is hitting stores now, if you can find them. My local Walmart had a good chunk of the wave, though Spider-Punk, Spider-India, and Miles G. Morales were already long gone from pegs.
I did get the only two figures I really had any interest in from the wave: throwback figures of Miles and Peter A. Parker from Into the Spider-verse. I had missed out on that first wave as I wasn’t really that into collecting yet. Given I already have the Gamerverse Miles and the retro-carded Spider-Man from a few years ago, they didn’t ring my bell at the time.
But this is now, and I really wanted a Spider-verse styled Spidey for my shelf, and it made sense to grab him and Miles. The figure, though, leaves a little bit to be desired.
Getting the actual design out of the way, the figure itself looks great, as you would expect. The sculpting emulates the unique art style of the movie spectacularly, and I really love the personality this Spidey has. The alternate unmasked head isn’t something I care that much about, but it’s nice to have and looks equally excellent.
The problem I have with this figure is it just feels like it should be a budget re-release. First off, the paint apps are pretty weak. The figure is molded in blue with some red and black paint, though they opted to sculpt lines instead of painting in the weblines. It’s a similar shortcut they’ve taken on other animated-style Spidey figures, like the What If…? Zombie Hunter Spider-Man from a while back.
The figure itself also feels on the smaller side, but it stacks up nicely next to other figures. What doesn’t stack up is the articulation. This figure seriously lacks some traditional Spidey articulation. There’s no waist cut, instead opting for an ab crunch and a swivel at the chest. The shoulders are also fairly limited, with no butterfly joint. The legs have swivels at the thigh and boot top, and the rocker feet do the job fine enough. Coupled with the incredibly thin build of the figure, and you wind up with a Spidey who feels pretty small.
Of course, that’s not even getting into the figure’s most criminal offering: the lack of accessories, especially for a Marvel Legends Spider-Man release. In addition to the unmasked head, you’ll get two pairs of hands – fists and web firing – and that’s it. No open hands for wall-crawling poses? No gripper hands for giving him other accessories? You wind up with a handful of static poses, and he looks great, but there just aren’t a lot of dynamic options for putting him on display.
This wouldn’t be so bad if this was a figure with a few bucks knocked off the price, but this absolutely anemic offering comes at the full retail price of other Legends figures. It’s a continuing pain point for the line as the price continues to rise, and the boxes contain fewer and fewer accessories.
I’m sure a lot of this comes down to the figure being a rough one for Hasbro. From what I can tell, it’s a mostly unique sculpt, and the unusual build and proportions of the design means they won’t be able to get a ton of reuse out of it. If, like me, you want to fill that Spider-Verse gap in your collection, it’s probably worth grabbing this one while it’s around if you find it. Otherwise, this is an easy pass.
