WARLOCK

MARVEL LEGENDS (HASBRO)

At last!  Self is complete!  Alright!  Now self can interact with all of self’s self friends, in awesome plastic form!  And now self will stop with self’s weird verbal tic, because self finds it hard to keep it up long term.

So, if the weird verbal tic didn’t make any sense to you, then you probably don’t know Warlock.  He’s a member of the Technarchy, an alien race of techno-organic beings.  He’s the son of The Magnus, the Technarch ruler.  He’s primarily a member of the X-Men spin-off team the New Mutants.  He was also the focus of the two-part opener of Season 5 of X-Men: The Animated Series, which is really how I know him.  He’s not the most prevalent character in terms of action figures, but he’s gotten a few.  And now he’s got a Marvel Legend.

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Warlock is the Build-A-Figure for—big leap here—the Warlock Series of Marvel Legends, which is the second X-Men-themed series since the X-Men were brought back to the main retail line.  The figure stands about 9 1/2 inches tall and he has 30 points of articulation.  Warlock is 100% new sculpt, which is, admittedly, the only way I can really see him being handled.  There’s also not really a lot of re-use potential here, which is a little surprising for a character like Warlock in this day and age.  Of course, I’m hardly going to complain about that.  Warlock’s a character who’s design is always in flux, even just from panel to panel.  This figure seems to take a good deal of his inspiration from Art Adams’ version of Warlock seen on the cover of New Mutants Special Edition #1, with a few tweaks to make him a little more polished and symmetrical.  The sculpt on this figure is really impressive; there’s just a ton of detail work, just everywhere.  Clearly, whoever sculpted this figure had a ton of fun with it and it results in a very strong figure.  What I really like about it is how complicated it is, while still maintaining a degree of cleanness to everything.  The head is my favorite bit; like with the Cyclops figure, when I look at this sculpt, I just see Warlock pretty much exactly how I think of him in my head.  There are some minor issues with the sculp. The most notable are the tubes that run from the arms to the back; they’re just a bit on the short side, which means they pop out of place with just about any sort of posing.  Given the alienness of the design, it’s not actually that big a deal, and a few collectors have had pretty good results just gluing both sides to the arms, thus preserving the both the silhouette and articulation.  Warlock figures tend to go with a black/yellow color scheme, but this one actually does things a bit different.  He’s molded in black, with a gold wash.  It’s actually surprisingly effective in replicating how Warlock tends to be depicted in the comics.  There’s some variance from piece to piece, since there’s no real way to get them all in sequence or something, but it’s done with enough overall consistency that he doesn’t look too patchwork.  Most BAFs don’t get any extras, but Warlock actually gets one: a buzz saw attachment to swap out for his right hand.  It’s pretty cool, and a nice way of showing off his shapeshifting abilities.  There’s a part of me that was really hoping for a swappable Cypher to replicate the old Warlock figure’s removable mask feature, but maybe we’ll get a Cypher proper down the line.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

Growing up, I had both parts of “The Phalanx Covenant” recorded on VHS.  They’re actually two of my favorite episodes The Animated Series, and they cemented in me a love of Warlock (the old Toy Biz figure was one of my favorites back in the day).  I was super stoked when this guy was confirmed for this series’ Build-A-Figure, and I’ve been anxiously awaiting his release.  This is easily the best Build-A-Figure since the Toy Biz days, and hands down the best Warlock figure in existence.  Putting this figure together was a ton of fun, and I’m just really hyped to have him!