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At SDCC 2016, Hasbro released a "Raft" box set, representing one of the Marvel Universe's supervillain prisons. The set featured a Spider-Man figure and four villains, most of whom were already scheduled for release elsewhere. It was kind of a bad offering, which is why we didn't buy/review it. One of the figures in the set was a pre-paint of this Build-A-Figure.
Exposed to a larger dose of the same gamma radiation as the Hulk, KGB Agent Emil Blonsky becomes the unstoppable Abomination! His body contorts, his skin becomes scaly and green, and his muscles bulge and distort. Bony protrusions spring from his back, and his mind becomes submerged in a gamma-induced rage as he becomes the only creature on Earth as powerful as the Hulk!
Abomination is the Build-A-Figure for the second series of Captain America: Civil War toys, though this series feels even harder to get ahold of than the first did. There are only six figures in the lineup, and six Abomination pieces, so you need not worry about duplicates or leftovers. Buy the entire series; get the head, torso, arms and legs; plug them all together; you've got yourself a stew going a gigantic Abomination.
While Hulk looks like a giant green human, Abomination is much more monstrous. He has all the usual anatomical shapes - two arms, two legs, recognizable human musculature, etc. - and it's not just that his
skin is thick, leathery, and has random bumps all over it; it's more the way that he seems to have organic armor plates covering his entire torso. He's like if an armadillo mated with a frog. On his chest and around his ribs they're basically just deep furrows in the skin, but by the time you get out to his shoulders, they're actual plates. There's similar armor flanking the spine, which is itself a ridge of spikes. Ouch! The final armor is on top of his feet, of all places - and while he has four fingers and a thumb on each hand, he for some reason only has two toes per foot.
The head is classic Abomination: the pointy bat wing ears;
the wrinkled chin that would make both Skrulls and Thanos find him welcoming; big scary teeth; a heavy, segmented brow that's more armor than eyebrow; and spikes on top of his head that are so numerous and tiny in this interpretation that they could almost pass for hair. It's a terrific sculpt (in both the original and modern meanings of that word), but once again we feel there was a missed opportunity here to release an alternate head for the figure, featuring the half-melted look he had for a while in the comics.
The Raft Abomination was painted a solid bluish-green from head to toe, while this version gets more intricate apps. His main color is a dark green, but it lightens to almost yellow on his chest, face, forearms, palms, and the soles of his feet, while the armor on his feet, shoulders and spine gets a touch of brown to darken it up and make it stand out. His eyes are blank silver, lined in black, and his blocky teeth are beige. It's a really nice look! His nails are black, so they don't really stand out at all, but his blue undies do.
The figure stands 8" tall, and has the axpected articulation: ankles, knees, thighs, hips, waist, torso, wrists, elbows, biceps, shoulders, neck and head. Since the limbs are so thick, he only gets single hinges in the elbows and knees, but we can accept that. What's not as good is the neck hinge: for whatever reason,
it was designed with a "lip" (for lack of a better term) around the joint; this lip was molded in the same dark green as the rest of the figure, but it wasn't given any paint, meaning it doesn't blend in at all with the chest; now, granted, if you leave Abomination looking down (as he would be at any normal-sized human figure) it's completely hidden, but if you tilt his head up or even straight ahead, it's visible, and it makes him look like he's had a stoma installed after a tracheotomy.
We don't exactly have a shortage of adequately sized Abominations - between the ToyBiz Marvel Legend (and its variant) and the Marvel Select figure, you have other choices when it comes to Hulk's second noteable enemy. But not being first doesn't mean you can't be best. Hide the weird neck with clever posing, and there's nothing about this BAF to not like. Though if we're being honest, since this is a Civil War series and we still don't have any version of the character at all, this would have been a nice opportunity to make Vision. No, he wouldn't have been as huge as Abomination, but at least now we'd have one, and even the "BAFs should be larger figures" crowd might be okay with that.
Scarlet Witch | Secret War Captain America | Captain Britain | Eel | Wonder Man | Iron Skull
-- 07/09/19
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