Madame Masque was part of Hasbro’s Marvel Legends Arnim Zola Series, which was the series where you bought a figure and got a Build-A-Figure piece for making the Captain America baddie Arnim Zola. Madame Masque is a long-time favorite of the Fwoosh, covered in past Make My Marvel! articles and reviewed as part of the Zola Series Archive.
Whitney Frost is, like, the coolest bad girl ever. She was born Giulietta Nefaria, is Count Nefaria’s daughter, and is part of the Maggia — you know them, Marvel’s mafia family. And she’s been around forever! First appearing in the pages of Tales of Suspense in the late ’60s, she’s been mixing it up with Iron Man and everyone else in the Marvel Universe for years. Currently she’s giving Kate Bishop and Clint Barton (the Hawkeyes) a hard time in the pages of Hawkeye. I’m a sucker for a tormented supervillain and Whitney plays the part perfectly.
The figure is great to have since I want the character, but it’s on a “dated” buck at the time of this writing and leaves me wanting an updated version. Well, at least updated legs. The female buck used is the 2-pack Black Widow buck, and it’s a great figure, but the hips joints are at that weird angle, the lower legs are really long, and there is no rocker ankle. And she looks like she could use a burger. I like the thin look of the figure; it’s got that athletic build that some female comic characters need, but the legs are really thin and the hip joint construction really makes the legs look thin. I need the new Storm legs here with some updated boots.
I love the head sculpt on this figure, dunno what it is, but it came out poppingly sharp, which is interesting since her swap, Madame Hydra, came out not so sharp.
The articulation is pretty decent on this figure. It’s pretty standard for what we can expect from a Marvel Legends female. I would like to have rocker ankles the figure because the ball-jointed ankle here limits the poses. And the figure is in serious need of wrist articulation. The more I play around with her, the more frustrated I get with the lack of wrist joints. I’m tempted to cut her hands off at the wrist and put a Revoltech ball-and-socket joint in there to give more range of motion and allow for some shouldered-rifle poses. Might do the same for the ankles.
She’s really a great figure, and I’m only nitpicking because I can. Yes, since the birth of the Moonstone and Storm bucks, Madame Masque now looks outdated, but that doesn’t mean she is a bad figure. On the contrary, she’s a solid figure with some great articulation and a decent sculpt. She has two guns and a belt. And she is half of the supervillain family that needs completion.
You can still pick her up via:
