Hopefully those of you who have been following this special week-long Legendary focus have enjoyed yourselves and have come away as eager to see some of these characters at SDCC this year as I am. We wrap up the week with one of the longer shots of the choices due to some major new tooling needed, but, if done right, could make one of the most unique figures in the entire line.
Mr. Hyde is another super-powerhouse that can stand toe-to-toe with major league heavyweights like Thor and the Hulk. He differs from the standard spandex-clad supervillain in that this dapper dynamo likes to drape himself in Victorian-era finery that would easily have been found on his literary namesake. I’ve always enjoyed the juxtaposition of his well-dressed manner and his thuggish, brutish persona.
It’s a broken record at this point to say that Mr. Hyde has also been a member of the Masters of Evil, but he was in the particularly noteworthy “Under Siege” storyline that gathered together an army of overpowered villains to smack the poop out of the Avengers… and mostly succeeded, crippling Jarvis, Hercules, and many others in their wake. Mr. Hyde is not a villain you take lightly. We have a pretty decent representation of villains from that era, so Hyde wouldn’t be alone if you wanted to make a MoE display from that era — just shove him beside the Wrecking Crew, Absorbing Man, and Tiger Shark and you’d have a powerful-looking grouping.
Debuting in Journey into Mystery, Mr. Hyde could easily be thought of as a Thor villain, but, like many others, he’s fought pretty much everybody, from Daredevil to Spider-Man to the Hulk to, of course, the Avengers, so he could easily be stuck in any line and fit in perfectly. I was first exposed to him in an Amazing Spider-Man two-parter, so I’ve always had a subtle connection between the two of them even if he’s not really a regular Spidey villain. Back in the old 5-inch days, I made a list of characters I’d like to see, and Hyde was on that list along with a handful of others. I’m still waiting.
In recent years we’ve managed to get an oddly large amount of recent Thunderbolts characters, most notably in the SDCC box set from a few years ago. While that’s fairly weird, we are still waiting for a previously shown Songbird figure to be shown, and having been associated with the Thunderbolts of that time period, Hyde would fit right in.
Hyde is usually drawn larger than average, but he’s been drawn recently as fairly gigantic. I’m not really down with the immature “make everyone huge!” line of thinking, so I’d be pretty happy if Hyde was made only slightly larger than other characters. I think that due to size and the variety of new tooling that would be required to make him just right, Mr. Hyde would make an outstanding Build-A-Figure along the line of Rhino. Since there’s nothing out there now body-wise that would work for him, he would need a completely new body, but the good news is that parts of him — from oversized pants and arms and the like — could easily be reused for a Mr. Fixit-era Hulk or a Kingpin, so there is definite reuse potential. I think the “Mr. Hyde wave” has an excellent ring to it.
Mr. Hyde has been ignored on most action figure fronts. Maybe he’s had a Minimate, but I don’t keep up with that line. I do know he’s had no 4-, 5-, 6- or 12-incher, so it’s pretty safe to say he’s been ignored for quite some time. I will never turn down the powerhouse characters, especially the villains of that nature, so I would be ecstatic if Mr. Hyde made it into a lineup at some point. A list of top five unmade villains could never be complete without Mr. Hyde. How about it, Hasbro?