D'Spayre

Okay, be honest: was this character included in the Doctor Strange line just because he wears a cape with a big collar? The embodiment of the ultimate evil, D'Spayre uses the fear of others to strengthen himself. In 1940, Aarkus, the Golden Age Vision, came to Earth, where he became a guardian of those in need and secret caretaker of the Cosmic Cube. After the assassination of Captain America by the coward Robert Ford at the end of Civil War, the heartbreak and sense of loss felt by the people filtered into a Cosmic Cube Aarkus was monitoring beneath the streets of Manhattan, and its reality-rewriting powers turned him into the demonic entity D'Spayre. Whoops! [Whoopsie! --ed.] One of the Fear-Lords, a group of demons who want to conquer Earth to feast on the fear of the populace, D'Spayre is sometimes drawn with just a plain human face, but more often with one that's different levels of corpselike. The face on this toy is even scarier than that, seemingly based on the art of the now-defunct Marvel War of Heroes game; it's got deep eye sockets, a tall nasal cavity, and a mouth that looks like a shredded gap rather than a purposeful opening. Creepy! Hasbro has chosen one of their thicker bodies to base this figure on, but for no clear reason: other than the hands and forearms, it's solid black, so the size wouldn't have really mattered, and the way his ragged cape drapes over the front of his shoulders keeps the extra pec hinges on this mold from contributing anything of value. Why this particular body? Maybe because they just hadn't used it in a year? We don't know. It's basically just a cape-delivery system anyway - but what a cape it is! The cape is packed separately in the box (possibly for paint reasons?), and to even get it on the figure you have to remove the head - good thing it's on a balljoint! The collar sticks up behind the head, just like Vision's cape, but all the edges on this one are moth-eaten tatters. There's a texture molded on the black interior, and a clasp at the neck matches the white exterior. Matches it perhaps a bit too closely, since the cape and clasp were usually (minorly) different colors in the comics, and here it gets lost in the design. Still, this is a piece that absolutely overshadows the body it rests upon. Like we said, D'Spayre's body is solid black, with just the gloves and face being white. The upper edges of the gloves look like fire, and are bright clean and white - a sign they were molded in that color, then the black areas were painted on. The face, by contrast, is white paint over black plastic, so it looks washed-out and gray. It would be a fine choice, if not for every other bit of white on the figure being so perfectly pristine. The only other color is red burning in the eyes. Other than the cape, D'Spayre's only other accessories are an alternate pair of open hands. He does get a Build-A-Figure piece, though: Rintrah's right leg. Despite having been around since 1978, the only thing of note D'Spayre has ever done is create the drug that unlocked Cloak and Dagger's mutant powers (and switched them for some reason). He's tangled with Dr. Strange a bunch of times, so he does make sense in this line, and it's not like there are a lot of excuses to make an action figure of D'Spayre. -- 04/28/22

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