Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: Spider-Punk (v2) review

Spider-Punk was one of the most popular characters in Across the Spider-Verse, something that was reflected in how hard it was to find his figure. It was a good toy, with a unique sculpt and detailed (for 2023 Hasbro) paint apps, but it was lacking one important thing: an unmasked head. As pointed out in the old review, he spends the majority of his time unmasked, so why not include an alternate head?

Third-party toymakers came to the rescue, making Hobie heads you could buy to complete your toy. But now Hasbro is doing an official one. You don't often see a toy company making an accessory for an action figure more than a year after its release, so this is quite a situation!

Miles is shocked when Spider-Punk takes off his mask and reveals he's black. The comics made that apparent in his first appearance, but there was still a surprise in store for fans who'd read that: Earth-138 Spider-Punk had the same gentle afro Earth-616 Hobie Brown sported, but the animated Earth-138B Spider-Punk had a gigantic set of thick, squarish wicks. Hot damn! How does he fit those into his mask?

It's a great sculpt, with the hair being complex enough that it barely looks like you'd be able to pull it out of the mold, a confident, unharried expression on his face, and all his various piercings - eyebrows, ears, nose, and lip - precisely where they should be. As you'd expect, the existing head pops off the balljoint easily, and this new one goes on just as easily. Just having this ups the desirability of last year's toy quite a bit.

However, this head costs a full $25, which is stupid. You're doubling the cost of the figure to get an "upgrade" that should have been with it in the first place, and that's hard to accept.

(Hasbro's tried to up the value by including a bit of a pack-in with it: a full version of Spider-Punk and all his accessories, just done in purple-magenta, presumably in an effort to depict the paper-cut artstyle that was his visual trademark. It's not a perfect attempt, but credit for being an attempt. It has the same unmasked head, meaning there are two of the same thing in the package, just in different colors.)

Spider-Punk, Spider-Punk/
Butts into your arguments!
Grabs some junk, any size/
Catch disease from fruit flies!
*James Brown noise* Here comes the Spider-Punk!

Is he strong? Lift up stuff.
He's got radioactive guts!
Can he sing to some bread?
Kill a pig til it's dead.
Hey squares! There goes the Spider-Punk!

We throw back tonight/
Tequila and lime/
When drunk we fight/
4am is the time!

Defiant, militant/
Cops find him belligerent.
Welcomes blame, he gets bored/
Holds his pants up with a cord.
To him, gas station's where we fill up!
Now all your friends have thrown up!
Can't beat the Spider-Punk!

(He does not include a masked head in purple, so you can probably look forward to a third version of this figure in the future, with that piece. Nothing more "punk" than letting a large corporation trick you [me] into buying the same thing three times because you [I] are [am] an obedient consumer, right? He also gets the little multiversal watch the Spider-Society all wear, which is new.)

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