Sue Storm, aka the Invisible Woman, finally made her first, demanded, sought-after appearance in her classic Light Blue and Black outfit in a 2-pack from Hasbro’s Marvel Legends line in 2009. YES! Finally, the team was complete! She came packaged with a painted variant of the earlier Hasbro Ares BAF series Human Torch in mostly human form in the same costume. Finally, the light blue and black team was completed!
Sue is an OK figure. On the surface the figure is pretty standard female buck; there is nothing sexy or MILF’d about it. It’s a pretty standard female buck, which fits Sue. I don’t have an image of Sue being a pimped-out, super-trained athlete or a super-skinny supermodel, so the buck fits; however, that said, she’s got some huge hands. I mean man-hands hands. These things are ginormous and not really what I’d expect to see on a woman of average build unless she comes from a long line of masons and partakes in masonry full-time. The hands are really ugly. The head-sculpt is a vast improvement over the original head-sculpt that came is 2007’s Hasbro Ronan the Accuser BAF series. That thing was nondescript horrible. Two-pack Sue really has a good head-sculpt and is head and shoulders better than anything that Toy Biz previously produced.
But the articulation kills he figure. The figure uses pretty standard Hasbro joints for the time: ball ankles, ball knees, thigh swivel, ball hips, ball chest, ball shoulders, ball elbows, ball wrists, and a ball head. Which is OK. Again, I can make the argument that Sue doesn’t need to be a contortionist, but she should have some range of motion. And she almost does except in the chest and head, where she has great forward motion. She can roll down without a hitch. But she can’t roll the other way, backwards. There is very limited movement and, in fact, she looks more hunched than straight up and down — a huge flaw in an OK figure. Another flaw is how the ball hips are engineered, they are OK going into the waist, but the thighs look horrible. There is a wide flare where the thigh meets the ball; the joint looks cheap and mechanical, rather than organic. Personally, I want double knees and elbows and thigh and bicep swivels in every figure, and the lack of these joints is really disappointing; it would have given her an extra “woof.”
The paint on this figure is a vast improvement over her earlier version, but it’s not great. At least it looks Hasbro tried. I have a tough time talking about Hasbro paint. The prototypes are very well done, but at the factory the paint is not a priority. The basic level of paint is added, making this category uninteresting. But customizers love it as it gives them a chance to show off their painting skills.
Overall, not a great figure, but way better than anything Toy Biz produced, but a long way from an “ideal” female sculpt. Currently, Sue sits in my display rounding out my Fantastic Four, at least until Hasbro comes up with something new. But as VeeBee recently posted, we need a new Fantastic Four with new sculpts (link).
You’ll have to hit the aftermarket to find this figure as she is no longer available on Amazon.com or BigBadtoyStore.com.
And as always you can discuss the figure on the Fwoosh forums: https://thefwoosh.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=96
