Our newest Marvel Legends figure: Captain Windswept.
You know, I like the Sentry. Many might say he’s got too many problems, overpowered, shouldn’t exist, was only a joke character that has overstayed his welcome, whatever. I get the criticisms—and I’ll admit I haven’t read a lot of stories that were written under the Bendis administration–but if there’s one thing I like about superheroes is the crazy powerful guys that can beat up galaxies and punch out suns.
Plus it’s just an excellent, basic superhero costume. It’s turn-of-the-century Silver Age economy of form, both timeless and of a time all at once, like all of the best costumes.
This is the third go-around of the Sentry in marvel Legends. Toybiz took a whack at him, Hasbro did him once before on the Hyperion body, and now they’re hitting him again, and this is probably the most successful of them all. I didn’t have much of a problem with him on the Hyperion body—and I know the complaints about the chest with that body but it’s never insulted me as much as it does others—but this iteration looks powerful while not being quite so thick.
It is a Frankenstein body, and there are some issues that come with the previously used parts. The arms don’t connect to the shoulders as fluid as they could. The shoulders jut out from the torso a little. But my main concern with a figure is how it moves and poses and plays, and in that capacity, it works for me. If you wag your finger at aesthetics then yeah, you will definitely find problems. But this is now my favorite Sentry figure.
As a bonus, it was ridiculously easy to get off of Walgreens. Boom, up and ordered. And still available as of right now.
Now, even though I like the figure, there is definitely a head scratcher going on here, and that is the fact that the promo shots showed him with expressive grabby hands, but the figure instead comes with…trigger finger hands?
Like I said, I’m not up on my Sentry reading, but last I heard he’s not popping caps in anybody. I was expecting and looking forward to him having both fists and expressive hands, because that is one of my favorite combos for punchy dudes. So the trigger fingers…yeah. That is a choice. Is it a mass booboo? Maybe the factory got the wrong memo. I don’t know. It’s weird, is what it is.
You should know my stance on capes by now, but this one does a pretty good job of getting out of my way. Nothing will beat a fabric cape for me, but this one hangs back enough to not impede his arm articulation. So as far as the necessary evil of a plastic cape goes, this one is okay.
Sentry comes with two heads. The regular head with the glorious windswept flow has a nice stern expression. I think that hair has more personality than the Sentry has ever been written to have. Just standing there, he looks like he’s…doing something. Or something is about to happen. The hair knows what’s going on. It’s about to get real.
The other head is a Void head, a spooky skull head with hair that is catching on fire. It almost makes me want to get a second Sentry to have the Void head permanently attached.
Despite the cobbled body and the weird hand misstep, I like this figure quite a bit. It does exactly what I need a Sentry figure to do.
I picked mine up from Walgreens last weekend and they accidentally gave me a second (I did a ship to store order) in the box LOL. Debating keeping it to have an extra with the Void head on myself, especially since it was free!
I think the Sentry stories are among Bendis’ most readable work, and I think this figure is incredible. I picked mine up from Walgreens yesterday and he looks like he walked right off the pages of New Avengers.