Hulk needs more villains in the Marvel legends line, especially since we’ve got two brand new Hulks with a gray one on the horizon. While there’s been an Abomination and an Absorbing Man and some older figures like Leader and so forth, he needs more villains.
More foes.
U-Foes.
The U-Foes are a powerful group of villains that have popped up over the years to give Hulk a fight and then disappear back into the place where villains go when they’ve been soundly trounced. Have you ever been soundly trounced? Let me tell you, it takes some time to come back from that kind of fight. And being trounced by the Hulk requires extra band-aids on their boo-boos.
I first ran across this team not too long after they had been created. It might have been their second appearance. I just know I was completely taken by the overall look of them. They were colorful and eyecatching and practically jumped out of the page, everything I wanted out of comics and comic characters at that age.
X-ray has a cool energy look that has been drawn a handful of ways. In olden times it was drawn with a series of lines expanding from his center, like radiating energy, but recent depictions have a nimbus of energy that is very reminiscent of the recent Living Laser figure we got. A lot of people felt that figure was an alternate head away from X-ray.
Ironclad is a big, hulking silver monstrosity. As they’re four people hit by radiation and transformed, Ironclad is the metal “Thing” of the group, the powerhouse that can almost go toe to toe with the Hulk. He’s like the Silver Surfer if the Surfer ate all of his Wheaties and everybody else’s as well. Does he lift, bro?
Vapor is…vapor. Shown more often than not as a wafting fume, she would be a hard figure to do justice to. Probably something clear with a painted gradient and some smoke effects? I don’t know. They might throw in a head and some cotton balls. While necessary to the group, she is definitely the least visually interesting of the group, but I’m sure there’s a way to do her justice in toy form without her being a glorified Cannonball-like statue-thing.
Vector is the one that grabbed my eye from the beginning. Vector’s design is insane, and looks like it was created solely to drive whatever artist had to draw that from panel to panel into a complete gibbering wreck of a human. Over the years artists have drawn him in various stages of “busy,” but overall his presentation has remained this level of bonkers. When you hit solid gold right out of the gate, you stick with it. You lean into it. Vector’s costume is insane, and I love it.
Lately we’ve been seeing a huge rise in multi-packs for Marvel Legends, with more on the horizon. That’s fine with me. I’ve bought almost all the recent multipacks—both comic and MCU—and have been enjoying getting a lot of different characters at once. It’s been even better getting many of them at a discount. In your face, list price!
The U-Foes would be a longshot to get as a box set of all four. Especially when it’s technically three figures and a fart. How popular would three figures and a fart be? How many people are lining up for the U-Foes. The world makes no sense to me, so this probably wouldn’t be that popular a set. There’s not a mutant to be seen.
Regardless, in some form, I’d love for the U-foes to get a crack at action figure glory, because my swanky new Hulk figures need something to pound.