PALADIN

MARVEL LEGENDS (HASBRO)

“Paladin is a mercenary marksman who always has his eye on the bottom line.”

Ah, Paladin.  Truly the most–he’s really quite the–okay, I don’t have a lot to say about Paladin.  I mean, to be fair, nobody really does.  In the 40 years since his introduction, he’s not actually gotten much of a backstory…or anything, for that matter.  He just sort of exists to fill a mercenary slot when needed.  Like in this Deadpool-themed Marvel Legends assortment.

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Paladin is the final figure in the Sasquatch Series of Marvel Legends.  He’s based on a more modern incarnation of the character, from around his time with the Thunderbolts.  Not his most memorable or distinctive look, but there’s a clear rationale behind this design choice, and that rationale is parts re-use.  I’ll get to that momentarily.  The figure stands 6 1/4 inches tall and he has 32 points of articulation.  As noted above, Paladin makes use of some parts re-use, though not as much I’d initially thought.  He’s built on the body used by the last Blade figure (which in turn re-used some parts from the ASM2 Electro).  He gets a new head, forearms, hands, and shins, as well as a holster add-on piece which appears to be new, but I could be wrong on that.  The new parts are decent recreations of his comics designs.  The head’s suitably generic, and the padded forearms and shins help to differentiate him from Blade.  The holster is mostly just there to hide that Hasbro still hasn’t re-tooled the Electro legs to remove that little nodule on his left thigh.  Paladin’s paint work is really the main thing that signifies his modern influences.  His palette is swapped from the classic look, which was purple armor on black, rather than black armor on purple.  I find this isn’t quite as striking a design, but I suppose it’s not terrible.  The application is at the very least cleanly handled, so I’ll give him that.  Paladin is packed with a pair of golden pistols (re-used from Zemo) and a knife.  The knife can be nicely slotted into the sheath on his boot, which is cool.  Unfortunately, there’s one holster for two guns, and the guns don’t actually sit that well in the holster.  That’s kind of disappointing.  He also includes another leg to the Build-A-Figure Sasquatch.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

Paladin slightly frustrated me.  When I heard they were making him, I was kind of excited, but when the prototype was unveiled with the modern look, I was a bit let down.  The more streamlined modern Paladin design facilitates the re-use more than the classic look would have, I suppose, but I can’t say I’m super into it.  I feel like with the amount of new pieces he got in the end, it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to go for an approximation of his classic design.  Because of this, I ended up passing on him the first few times I found him.  I ended up getting a bunch of store credit for Cosmic Comix after helping out on Free Comic Book Day, and they had this guy, so I ended up grabbing him from them.  He’s not a bad figure at all, and certainly works as a generic merc, but I do wish he were a little more distinctive.