We’ve seen a lot of brand new villains debut lately in the recent tornado of Marvel product hitting shelves. With three waves all slamming into aisles and online within a very short amount of time, our ranks are growing at a rapid rate. Blizzard joins such bad guys as Grim Reaper and Tiger Shark in presenting well-done lower-tier villains to plague our heroes.
Blizzard is a pretty simple villain with a simple gimmick wrapped-up in a simple but effective costume. When you look at Blizzard with his icy blues and stark whites you immediately think, “Hey, this is a cold dude.” With such basic iconography, all Blizzard needs for a perfect execution is an appropriate blank body and a nice paint job, both of which he received.
Basic is about the size of it when you look at his figure. He’s all Black Panther body with a new masked head and a pair of fists. I can’t help seeing a brand new Moon Knight when I look at him. In fact, I could probably name a half-dozen fully masked characters on blank or blankish bodies that could be pumped out on this exact platform. I know for whatever reason people seem to chafe at the idea of a shelf full of figures that all look more or less alike, but that’s less than irrelevant to me.
The newly sculpted head is nice and generic — and to me that’s a selling point. There’s no overdone details, giant eyebrow bones, heavy cheeks, an oversized nose, or anything of the sort. It’s just a good, basic masked head.
With a pair of fists Blizzard can get into plenty of cool “freeze!” poses.
With only two real tones to the costume, some parts are molded in white with blue paint, and some are molded in blue with white paint. Yes, I am Captain Obvious. But where that can sometimes go wrong — like trying to paint yellow over pretty much any color — here the paint and plastic do a nice job of matching up. There is going to be some tonal differences in the whites, but not so much that it stands out. Thankfully, they didn’t bother for any type of shading with the white, so he’s got a very pure look to him.
The molded blue is an effect Hasbro has been using on various figures that I think we’ve all become used to, which is a mixture of plastic swirl and a slightly pearlescent-ness — a swirlescent quality, let’s say — that makes it look a bit different than a plain blue. This is supposed to be a suit of armor, after all, even if it’s mostly comprised of micro-circuitry, so the swirlescent quality makes it feel like a bit more than just standard spandex. On the parts where the blue had to be painted they used a pearlescent blue to match their factory swirl, and there’s not a lot of noticeable difference in the two. There are a couple of places where the blue didn’t get into the grooves—a problem that has come up now and then, most notably on the First Appearance X-Men box set where a lot of people had a ton of black showing through the yellows. It’s definitely something Hasbro needs to try for a bit more quality control on.
I don’t have a packaged shot of him, but Blizzard comes with both the front and back portions of the Hulkbuster torso, and, yes, they do come as two separate pieces that have to be snapped together. I personally don’t need it, but being such a basic figure I do wish they had been able to sneak in some simple ice effects that could clip onto his wrists for people who are into that kind of thing. As is, you’ll have to search around if you want him to look like he’s frozen on your shelf freezing. That was a confusing sentence . . .
Blizzard had an action figure back in the old 5-inch Iron Man line but has been MIA since. It’s great to add both another lower-tier villain and another Iron Man bad guy to the collection.