Spider-man somehow gets a wave every other wave, completed with six out of eight figures being new Spider People. Captain America gets a new figure every wave and Iron Man every other wave. Somehow, the X-men, arguably Marvel’s most popular property, only warrants one wave a year, if they are lucky. The last wave was the Jubilee BAF wave too, which is one of the worst disasters is crummy distribution in the history of the line making it extremely pricey on the secondary market. Fortunately the Juggernaut wave seems to be a little easier to get a hold of. It’s a pretty solid wave all around as far as character choices too, though there are so many well known X-men characters that it would be hard to make a truly awful wave of X-men.
Today I wanted to take a look at Kitty Pryde, who ended up being a nice, unexpectedly nice figure from the wave. Kitty has a lot of potential to be a boring throw away figure for sure. Her costume design isn’t particularly flashy and there isn’t really any way to recreate her power with any interesting accessories. The female figures in the Marvel Legends line are also inexplicably plagued with QC issues, especially when compared to their male counterparts.
Kitty manages to skirt right around almost all of these potential issues. The biggest is just how nice she looks in sculpt and paint apps, particularly in the head. I’m not saying they aren’t out there, but I have seen few reports of the common “derpy eyes” that shows up a LOT on the lady Marvel figures. The flesh tone looks nice and natural, the hair sculpt and paint is nicely crisp.
The yellow and black on her uniform is very nicely done as well, yellow can often be a very problematic color for toys. It definitely matches the look of one of her more well known uniforms overall as well.
Kitty Pryde also comes with an accessory in the form of her little dragon buddy Lockheed. Lockheed is really great in his execution. His overall shape from his wings to his tail added with the rubbery plastic he is made of allow him to easy perch on Kitty’s arms or shoulders easily without the need for any ugly pegs or clips. It makes him look very natural on her and though it’s not a rock solid connection, it’s stable enough for some movement while he is attached to her.
Unfortunately, short of disassembling the figure, there isn’t any way to recreate her power, which involves passing through walls. That’s not really a knock or anything, plenty of X-men have non visual powers like psychic abilities or invulnerability. Kitty Pryde was a figure that I expected to be pretty lame but is probably one of the best figures in the wave.
