GWEN STACY

SILVER AGE (TOY BIZ)

“Former student and model, Gwen Stacy was also Peter Parker’s girlfriend. Both Peter and Gwen were Biochemistry majors at Empire State University where they met and fell in love. Unbeknownst to Gwen, Peter Parker was secretly Spider-Man and Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin knew so. The Green Goblin kidnaped Gwen Stacy and used her as a hostage to exact revenge on his nemesis, Spider-Man. During their battle, the Goblin knocked Gwen Stacy off the Brooklyn Bridge. Spider-Man caught her with his webbing. Tragically, Gwen died from the shock of the fall, thus ending a major chapter in the personal life of Peter Parker.”

Last week, I took a jump into one of Toy Biz’s one-off specialty assortments released in 1999 to fill out their 5-inch Marvel run.  Titled “Silver Age”, it was designed to highlight characters from Marvel’s heyday of the ‘60s.  While largely heavy hitter driven, it did give them an opportunity for one slightly more off the beaten path sort of character.  By the end of the ‘90s, Spider-Man’s then-current love interest Mary Jane Watson had gotten two figures from Toy Biz, both via multipacks with Spidey variants.  His previous love interest, Gwen Stacy, was as of yet without any sort of toy coverage, but that was fixed by Silver Age, where she made her figure debut.

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Gwen Stacy was one of the four figures in Toy Biz’s Silver Age line.  She was the only non-heavy hitter in the bunch, but paired off well with the included Spider-Man figure.  Gwen’s an interesting choice for a Silver Age line; she was created during the Silver Age, but her death, which is a major piece of her bio for this figure, is one of the defining events of the Bronze Age, and as such she’s frequently attached to that era.  The figure stands right about 5 inches tall and she has 9 points of articulation.  Her posability is odd.  She’s got no neck or elbow movement, but she’s got one wrist and ankles.  She’s not particularly agirl.  Gwen’s using what appears to be a variation of Aurora’s body from the Alpha Flight line, but smoothed out for a better base starting point.  It’s decent enough, but the torso’s a little too tightly sculpted to believably be a shirt.  She gets a cloth skirt piece as well, and a unique head/hair.  Interestingly, Gwen’s *not* wearing her attire from “The Night Gwen Stacy Died” despite that being the usual go-to.  It’s a design that still feels rather Gwen-y, though, so it works out well enough. The paint work on this figure is okay.  The skin tone’s nice and clean, as are the stripes on her shirt.  The eyes are a touch wonky, though.  Gwen is packed with a camera (presumably borrowed from Peter?  It’s a unique piece, though), and a pair of clip-on fur pieces for her boots, for fashion purposes, no doubt.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

I remember seeing this figure a fair bit in ’99, but I didn’t know who she was at the time.  It was actually this figure that kind of got me interested in finding out, so I guess that’s kind of cool.  I didn’t get her at the time, though.  She’s a far more recent addition, from the last few years, grabbed during one of my family vacations from Gidget’s Gadgets, a neat shop in the area.  She actually got me invested in getting the rest of the Silver Age line-up, which I’d up to then been putting off.  She’s okay.  Not super playable or distinctive, but at the same time, she’s pretty solid for a civilian character who’d never gotten a figure before.