It’s amazing to me that this is the first time we’re getting an actual ’90s era Jubilee in the Marvel Legends line. ToyBiz never got around to her, and Hasbro led off with a modern Jubilee that was the build a figure in a hard-to-acquire wave. Lovers of jean shorts and fireworks the world over can now rejoice. Oh, and we’ve also got a psychotic Logan figure also. More on him later.
There was a minor kerfuffle when the previous Jubilee figure landed on the world dressed in all black with not a jean short to be found. Sure, the yellow trenchcoat was still there, but the all black bodysuit just didn’t do it for a lot of people for whom Jubilee should be permanently attired in the best finery that the ’90s could offer.
It’s funny. Not funny haha, but the kind of funny that makes your eyebrows scrunch down over your eyes and tilt your head. It wasn’t until I joined Fwoosh and was exposed to a metric ton of vastly differing opinions of all kinds that I realized that Jubilee was…divisive. Sure, you’re going to have people indifferent to her. You’re going to have people that love her. But the people that hate her? Boy, they hate her. Like, they blame her for the ’90s and for crosshatching and everything that apparently went wrong with mutants. Gambit takes up some of that hate as well, but we’ll get to him tomorrow.
For me, I don’t hate her. It never really occurred to me to hate her. She’s a comic character. She’s made of paper and ink. I don’t hate paper and ink. Paper and ink never did anything to me. Of course, I’ve never been subpeonaed, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Jubilee kind of took over the role that Kitty Pryde once held, the young girl that Wolverine kind of took under his wing and mentored, except with 50 percent more “let’s go to the mall.” I guess X-23 took over that role from Jubilee. Maybe there’s another one since her. I can’t keep up. Logan likes mentoring the young ones.
Jubilee is a nice figure with some brand new sculpting to make her as fully 90stastic as she can possibly be without running a rerun of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air across her boobies. The gloves and boots and torso and shorts…hell, is she all new? I don’t keep a mental database of bodies, but she might very well be all knew. So this wave has a lot of new tooling in it.
Jubilee is a case of haves and have nots. In the haves, she has two different heads with a number of her trademark pink sunglasses. One head is a typical Jubilee head, and the other one has her blowing a bubble. While the regular head works well, I love the bubble blowing head. The only other time I can think of a bubble blowing head that was just as apropos as this is one of the 25th Anniversary GI Joe Breaker figures. It’s not something I need as her default look, but it’s a fun inclusion.
Her main head has a pair of sunglasses that are glued on. She also comes with two other pair: one for the gum head, and one…in case you lose them, I guess. I haven’t decided if I’m going to leave the pair on her head or try to detach them so I can have them resting on her forehead.
In terms of have-nots, Jubilee comes with no fireworks effects. Now, even though I’m saying this, I’m not of the camp that actually “needs” something like that. All the various effects that we’re gotten with other figures have only ended up in a sandwich bag. But the fact is, even if I don’t use them, there they are. Jubilee feels strangely naked without something for her to do with her waggling fingers. Like I said, I don’t necessarily need them, but in a wave with with both Gambit and Blink coming with effects that show off their powers, Jubilee seems left out.
But other than that, this is a fine figure and well worth the long wait for a proper Jubilee figure.
Next up, the obligatory Wolverine of the wave…kind of.
Wolverine was once a guy whose past was steeped in mystery. We didn’t know if Logan was his first name or his last, or if it was his name at all. All we knew was that at one point his bones were bonded with the hardest metal around. Along came Barry Windsor-Smith, who provided a serialized story in Marvel Comics Presents that gave us the definitive look at how a cranky Canadian runt was introduced to a whole lotta Adamantium. And then he proceeded to eviscerate everybody that did this to him. It’s essentially a horror story featuring Logan, except he’s not really Logan as we know him in this story, but Weapon X.
This version of Wolverine has not been met with as much fanfare as the more popular versions. It doesn’t play well with others, is the problem. Story-specific, time specific, I can kind of understand the complaints, but for those of us who loved the story it is a must-have version. And as a figure, it hits all the excellent highs of recent Wolverine figures.
The figure is mostly nude with a handful of technical bits hanging off of him, replicating the in-story look very well. Unlike most recent Logans, he doesn’t come with a set of unclawed hands, but that works well because this version is all-psycho all the time, and exists only to cut stab and rend his way through anything that stands in his way. Just like the character, this figure is the best there is at what it does. Mine had a bit of a weird gap between his thighs and his hips, but otherwise everything worked smoothly and allowed him to get into all types of Wolverineish poses. The hoses are flexible enough so nothing is impeded.
He comes with a fully helmeted head and an unhelmeted head. This is as feral as we’ve ever seen him, with long, unkempt, unruly hair, closer to animal than man. There’s an eerie mixture of rage and sadness in the sculpt, depending on the angle. It’s only let down by the typical dodgy factory paint.
While I like this unhelmeted head more than some of the recent unmasked heads we’ve had, I still prefer the helmeted head as default for this figure. It adds to the mysterious berserker nature and makes him look more like he’s the pawn in another person’s game. I doubt we’ll ever get anybody else from this storyline, but a Cornelius would be cool to have.
A divisive inclusion among fans to be sure, but I am glad to have an updated version of this particular era of Wolverine’s life.
Four down, four to go, and so far Hasbro is four for four.
