KING VALKYRIE

MARVEL LEGENDS (HASBRO)

“When a dangerous new visitor threatens the livelihood of New Asgard, King Valkyrie is forced to take up her sword once more to defend her people.”

After dispensing with a lot of the title character’s supporting cast, Thor Ragnarok filled in the missing roles with a handful of new players, of varying importance and seriousness.  On the slightly more serious side, as well as the slightly more important to the overall mythos side, was Valkyrie, a supporting player not only in Thor’s side of things in the comics, but also in the larger Marvel Universe.  Though she really only got a glorified cameo in Endgame, the character was still given a solid jump-start for her next adventure, being handed the official title of leader of the Asgardians, which appears to come with the honorific “King” no matter who it’s being handed to.  I can dig it.  With this new title, Valkyrie is poised for a rather important role in Ragnarok‘s follow-up Love and Thunder, and gets a new figure to accompany that role.

THE FIGURE ITSELF

King Valkyrie is figure 3 in the Korg Series of Marvel Legends.  This marks our fifth Valkyrie as a Legend, and the third time it’s been specifically the Tessa Thompson version of the character.  For the new movie, Valkyrie’s attire appears to be sort of an averaging of her two prior designs, making it thus far the closest adaptation of her classic comics design.  I can dig that.  The figure stands just over 6 inches tall and she has 31 points of articulation.   Her articulation scheme is on par with Jane Thor’s, which makes it a noted improvement on the two prior versions of the character.  She not only gets double elbows this time around, but she’s also using the pinless construction for both them and the knees, making her a much cleaner looking figure.  Her sculpt is an all-new one, and a pretty good one at that.  The head continues the trend of each version of the Tessa Thompson likeness being a stretch better than the last.  I really thought the Endgame one was pretty solid, but this ends up being even closer.  I feel like the expression helps a bit more here.  Her look of self-satisfaction is really selling it.  The rest of the sculpt does a solid job of capturing the costume, at least from what we’ve seen of it.  The cape is largely flat, but there’s a bit of flow at the base, which works surprisingly well.  The figure’s color work is bold and fairly bright, which I quite like, especially compared to the other versions of the character.  The face printing works very well, and really aids with the likeness.  King Valkyrie is packed with her sword, as well as the head and club for Korg.  It’s a bit on the light side, but it seems like this whole wave got hit with that in order to keep a heavier price jump at bay.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

As with my review of the Endgame Valkyrie, I went into this one not feeling like I *needed* another version of the character.  That said, I liked the new look, and wanted to at least give the figure a try.  She’s even better than the last one, which I felt was already a surprising improvement.  This one’s really just a lot of fun.  I look forward to seeing what she gets up to in the movie.

Thanks to my sponsors at All Time Toys for setting me up with this figure for review.  If you’re looking for toys both old and new, please check out their website.