In the ’90s, comics decided to do a number of things to various characters. Bomber jackets. Armor. Shoulderpads. Mullets. Nobody was safe. It was a time of experimentation. In a way it was a time of liberation from older, arguably stodgier times. Instead of “we can’t” the philosophy shifted to “why can’t we…”
Sometimes those experimentations worked very well for the character. In my opinion, the armored look for Daredevil works very well. Maybe I’m biased as it’s mostly red and black—my favorite color combo—but the design is strong, and it doesn’t feel as dated as some of the other variations do, like Captain America’s brief armored phase.
(Which I would still buy, but not with the same amount of enthusiasm.)
The armored version of Daredevil first got a figure way back in the vintage Marvel Superheroes line. The costume was more or less current, so the synchronicity was strong. I would have expected this version of Daredevil to appear on the regular retro card to continue the homage, but instead he shows up on the Spider-Man branded retro card. I don’t really care how it shows up, I’m just glad that this version of Daredevil finally got an upgraded figure.
Overall, the figure is very nicely done. There’s a lot of new sculpt here, from the segmented torso sections to the wrists and the gauntlets and the knees and…well hell, it looks like this body is almost entirely new. The biceps, feet and hands might be reuse, but there is a lot of new tooling going on. It’s a lot of effort to put forth on a niche costume variation, but it’s much much better than going the route of painted on details. That would have been terrible.
The only area that is limited is the shoulders, as the armor overlay there does prevent him from putting his arms fully outward, but it swivels and raises fine and everything else, including the double elbows and double knees work very well. He gets a decent range out of his hips, and the neck does great, allowing him to look up and down with great range. The ab-crunch gets a nice amount of forward and a pretty good amount of backward.
I really like the red used. The black is the regular flat black used on most figures, but the red is a pearlescent metallic looking red that’s deep and rich without a trace of that orangeyness that some reds skew towards on toys. It’s a purer red, in other words.
The sculpted-in silver of the legs is a nicer silver than the cast-silverish color the gauntlets and shoulder-armor comes in, but it’s forgivable.
Daredevil comes with two pairs of hands: grips and fists. He comes with two different gauntlet sections that can be swapped depending on which hands you’re using. One set of gauntlets has the billy-clubs sculpted to them, and then there’s a separate pair for when he’s holding the clubs in his hands. Armored Daredevil didn’t have the leg holster.
He also comes with an unmasked Matt Murdock head that would be better suited (no pun intended) to one of the suited bodies. This head is far better than the previous Murdock head that’s made the rounds. This one has a nice set of sculpted-on glasses (that make this same wave’s Peter Parker glasses look even more ridiculous) and looks much more like Matt Murdock than the previous recycled head.
This is just a really good version of a moment-in-time version of Daredevil. I know how much you like the figure and/or costume is going to be weighted by how much appreciation/nostalgia/open-mindedness you have regarding the 90s and everything that comes with the 90s, but if you have no particular bias for that era then hopefully you can appreciate just how well done a figure this is.
