Shriek

The guy whose weakness is sound is in love with the girl who has sonic powers? Now that's a toxic relationship! Frances Louise Barrison, aka Shriek, escapes from captivity and forms a twisted family with like-minded villains to terrorize Spider-Man. One of only two comic figures in this No Way Home series, it's apparent Shriek made the cut because she showed up in this past fall's Venom: There Will Be Carnage. (A bit ironically, the Venompool ML series was originally intended to be a loose tie-in with the movie, until it got delayed a year.) Now, Naomie "Tia Dalma/Eve Moneypenny" Harris doesn't look a lot like comicbook Shriek, but it's still the same character. Side note: what is it with non-MCU Marvel movies taking alabaster women who wear black clothes and turning them into black women with one slightly weird left eye? It's only happened twice, but that's still a heck of a coincidence. It's like the tractors/super-cars thing. This is the classic Mark Bagley Shriek, circa the 1993 "Maximum Carnage" crossover. The main difference is that she's got fairly normal hair with bangs in the front rather than a giant mane billowing all around her like a black Starfire. She's got the diamond-shaped mark over her eye - maybe a scar or something - though it's black rather than 90s blue. The figure uses one of the standard bodies - the one with the butt, plus the Lady Deadpool chest. Since her costume is mostly just a black bodysuit with big cutouts to reveal her white skin, that works. She has a silver bracelet on her left wrist, a pair of silver disc earrings molded on her head, and a belt of silver discs draped around her waist that you think would be reused from one of the Black Widow figures, but surprisingly isn't. Her sleeves have ragged (painted) edges, reaching to the wrist on her left arm and just below the elbow on the right. Like we said, the white parts of her design are actually bare skin, meaning the body of the costume and the bit around her neck are two separate things, because that jagged white line runs all the way around the front ond back of her torso. The little spikes on it suggest an audio visualization, suiting her sonic powers, but it does cause a problem: since the line goes all the way around, it's painted on pieces that move; thus, if you move the arms even a millimeter away from the position in which it was painted, the illusion is ruined. No way to avoid that, sadly. She gets a lot of hands, though: open, holding, or fists. But hey, big ups to Hasbro for molding the wrist joints in either black or white depending on the hand, so the colors match the arm rather than scraping away. Shriek comes with two parts of this series' Armadillo Build-A-Figure: the torso and back-armor. Presumably they're separate pieces because it would otherwise have been too tough to get those big, round shoulders out of the molds? The armor on the lower back is molded on, after all. We already have Carnage, Demogoblin, and Doppelganger, so with the release of Shriek, all we need is a Carrion to finish their dysfunctional little family. -- 01/10/22

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