I wasn’t planning on getting this wave of figures, but it’s been a while since I got new plastic and I saw that Megalopolis had it in stock, so I put in an impulse order. We are going to start off our look at the wave with the MCU version of Taskmaster from the upcoming Black Widow film!
Tasky comes in the standard ML box but this one features a nice Black Widow logo on the front and some slick artwork on the sides and back.
Taskmaster comes with a bow and arrow, a shield, a sword, gripping hands and claw hands.
The bow is cast in all one semi-flexible plastic piece with the bow string fixed in the relaxed position. The arrow can rest in a clip on the bow, which helps reduce the inherent frustration of setting up bow wielding poses. Generally, I prefer action figure bows to come without the string or with an elastic string installed, but since the articulation is set up for drawing a bow, I would have preferred a single piece bow to be sculpted drawn back.
The shield is pretty solid and stiff and has Tasky’s traditional symbol on the front and one of those flippy clippy things that allows you to either clip the shield to his arm or hold the peg. There isn’t a spot on the back to plug in the shield and it seems a little on the small side, but looks good with the figure.
The sword has some nice detail lines etched into it and the cutting surface is orange. I’m not sure if that means it’s supposed to glow orange or it’s just a painted edge but it looks cool and matches the outfit well. The grip hand seems designed for a gun and holds this a little loosely.
The claw hands have a very Black Panther feel to them and it looks to me from trailers that maybe Taskmaster dupes T’Challa’s fighting style in the film. I honestly never thought of Taskmaster duplicating the Black Panther’s fighting style, but I really love the way that it looks in figure form here. The claws are probably my favorite accessory. The fists are fine, but the right hand grip is a little loose when holding the sword. I do wish the sword holding hand had an up/down hinge.
The sculpting detail on this guy is pretty phenomenal with all the different cloth textures and armor details. He’s got a solid, impressive build in a more realistic vein. I think some of the details are probably not 100 percent on model based on what I’ve seen in trailers, but I feel like you have to look really hard to spot the differences. At this point we know the score with these first wave figures from MCU characters, they sometimes don’t match because they are based on production art or things get changed. You are either OK with this or not. I tend to be mixed on it, but Taskmaster’s look works for me.
The articulation is Marvel Legends standard with:
- Swivel/hinge neck, shoulders, wrists, hips, and ankles
- Hinged mid-torso
- Double hinged knees and elbows
- Swivel waist, bicep, and thighs
- Pec hinges
The ab crunch REALLY crunches, however the neck can’t hinge far up enough to make that terribly useful. The hood is glued onto the head and while I would have liked to see the removeable hood, I like the way this hood fits and the level of movement quite a lot. There is one unusual thing with the arms where they can easily bend backward at the elbow, which isn’t really a problem but looks pretty weird. Unfortunately the pec hinges don’t work well to bring the arms closer together across the body. It’s pretty tough to get him in a decent two-handed sword pose.
The paint is also pretty nice with some shiny metallic blue and silver. The gloss black on the eyes is so glossy you can see my reflection in some of these shots. I think the blue costume is a little over-glossy and I would have liked a black wash to bring out the details in the face.
Overall I like this figure, but don’t love it. He’s a solid, chunky commando figure that I wish had some better arm articulation to hold the swords. I did get a little cranky trying to get the bow to work and dropped the arrow so many times. I think I might be done with bow and arrow figures, guys. I’m just tired of it.
