In life’s constantly rotating bouts of elation and frustration, toys can be masters of manipulation. There are some characters that you don’t really think have a shot at getting an action figure. Then, suddenly, a figure is announced — but there’s this little naggling annoyance because the figure isn’t in the scale you’d prefer. With two differently scaled Marvel lines currently running out there, that happens frequently. Such is the way of things.
Death’s Head is one such character. While there’s a supreme amount of toyetic-ness about him, I never figured he’d be lucky enough to get a figure of his own. The words “too obscure” or “too niche” seemed all too easily applied, or any of a dozen excuses the toymakers use to keep from making a figure. But then he was announced… but for the Marvel Universe line. Now, I have nothing against that line, and while I don’t collect it with the fervor of the Marve Legends line, I own plenty of them, and already have Death’s Head happily preordered at BBTS.
Looks awesome, yes? But it’s just not the same. ML is my preferred line and is the line I’d like to see take character chances like that. The good news is plenty of characters that popped up initially in the MU line have crossed over into ML, so I’m hoping that the same consideration could be afforded here. A 6-inch-scaled Death’s Head would be the bee’s knees, especially since that would be a decent enough size to buy one for my ML collection and a second one for my Transformers Masterpiece figures to fight. For those that don’t know, he was initially featured fighting them in the UK Transformers comic. It’s like the best of two worlds. That’s two sales right off the bat! And he was also connected to Doctor Who, so Who fans would dig one for… well, all the Whos down in Who village, even Cindy Lou Who who was no more than two. Wait…
I’ll be honest, though; I didn’t initially come across Death’s Head in a comic. My first meeting with this unique robot was on a card. Remember the Marvel trading cards of the early ’90s? If you were a comic fan at that time, these were huuuge! Hell, even non-comic fans were buying these and trading them. The oddest assortment of people all of a sudden had a pocket full of cards with comic book characters on them. It was nuts. If you think Marvel movies have made comic characters more mainstream, these little strips of cardboard were wreaking havoc all across the uninformed back in ’90 and ’91. Hell, I bought an Aunt May card that was eluding me from a teacher for a quarter. A teacher! That’s nuts.
OK, that’s all a diversion for another article. But to summarize, Death’s Head’s card grabbed me way back then and left an imprint on my brain.
He left such an impression that seven years ago when I was in my customizing infancy I tried to make one of my own:
Death’s Head is, at the core of it, just a completely cool character. He’s a bounty hunter, so that already brings with it a certain cache, and beyond that he’s a robot. Robots are always cool. Robot bounty hunters are even cooler, as IG-88 and 4-LOM would insist. If we’re talking about the original Death’s Head, he’s had two different appearances, and if this were another time, I’d welcome one as the variant of another. Nowadays when comic characters have to be slotted into movie lines, I don’t have much hope for getting both of his particular costumes, so the blue and yellow would be more than sufficient, just like on the MU figure.
Since he would need a body that was not in ML’s current inventory, Death’s Head would work well following the MU pattern of using a Colossus-styled body. Which would require a decent ML Colossus. That segmented armor skin would be useful for a decent enough handful of characters to justify its creation anyway, and getting a Death’s Head made with a judicious use of overlays would be icing on the cake. SDCC seems to be the dumping ground nowadays for random figures — unless we somehow got lucky and he was pooped into an Iron Man wave with Iron man 2020 because they fought that one time. There’s got to be a better way, but, for now, this is what we’re stuck with. Either way, I don’t care, I’d just like him made. If done correctly, he’d be an awesome, colorful, and unique figure, and ML would be richer for having him.
