|
Steal This Action Figure.
Hobie Brown is the British punk Spider-Man
better known as Spider-Punk. Guitar in hand, he's ready to show New York City a very different kind of Spider-Person!
The original Spider-Punk was, famously, a rejected idea for Spider-UK, who proved to be such a strong visual that they put him in the comics anyway. And now, such a strong visual that he's been put in the second Spider-Verse movie and has proved to be probably the breakout character of the film. (It's him or Pavitr Prabhakar, but Pavitey was less integral to the plot.) So from a thrown-away sketch for a throwaway character to everybody's new fave? Overcoming the odds to be more than you were destined to be? That's what Spider-Man is all about!
The adaptation from comics to cartoon has deeply benefitted Spider-Punk. He was previously just a normal Spidey wearing a take on the "House of M" suit under a vest. And while the broad strokes remain the same, this one is much more his own person, rather than being a copy of Spider-Man. He still wears a red mask with white eyes, but those eyes are asymmetrical and jagged, rather than perfectly shaped, and the eight silver spikes on his head are taller, thinner, and physically sharper.
Rather than a reused body, animated Spider-Punk gets an entirely new sculpt courtesy of Arlen Pelletier. It's ridiculously tall and thin, because these toys are allowed to have style, and it adapts
the animation design as well as a physical object can. This is still a Spidey wearing a vest, but it's more than that now. This is more of a Scarlet Spider base than House of M, because it's a solid red suit with a blue shirt worn over top. The blue on his forearms was designed like ripped fishnets, but the idea doesn't translate very well here. His vest is black leather instead of blue denim, and has a sketchier version of the FNSM logo on the back. There are three large spikes on top of each side, and there's an entire field of studs across the back of the shoulders. He wears pants with light blue suspenders hanging down, and his boots go up to his knees rather than just going above his ankles. It's a much more hardcore look.
Unfortunately, a toy will never be able to duplicate Spider-Punk's coolest feature, the way he would constantly change colors and was surrounded by a rough, blocky outline that meant you could take any frame he appeared in, and he'd look like a DIY mixed-media punk show poster. It's awesome and energetic and anarchic, and can only work in a full-motion medium. Try to do that on a toy and it'd just look cheap;
it'd never work. Sony managed to animate a character who looked photo-real, but several generations of photocopying removed. Hasbro did a decent job with this toy, painting the buttons on his lapels, the zippers, and the studs across his back (though only a few of the ones on his bracelet and armband, for some reason), but the body is still required to be solid colors that never switch. One of the concepts for him would have included plaid pants - a totally punk aesthetic that also would have suggested webbing - but in the final draft that was relegated to just a few highlights.
Instead, we get a Spidey-influence thanks to red boots with blue laces. Which, yes, are Spider-Man's colors, but it's also a kind of
a meta joke? And maybe a spoiler? See, when the punk scene was developing in 1970s London, a lot of the kids employed a "lace code" to display allegiences: racists stealing the pre-existing skinhead look wore white or red shoelaces, the heroes who would stomp the shit out of those losers wore yellow to signify anti-racism, purple was for the queer community, etc. But Hobie's got blue, and blue? It's been softened a bit today, but back then it meant you'd killed a cop. So this design may be telling us Hobie was more dirctly involved in his canon event than most of the other Spiders have been.
This figure gets the same guitar as the comicbook Spider-Punk, though it looks a ton better here, because it actually gets some paint apps instead of being bright white. It's molded in brown, then
has a bunch of stickers painted on the face. The strap is the same blue as his suspenders, but it can't actually sit on the shoulder the way it should thanks to his giant spikes. His right hand is molded holding a pick, and his left is on the strings. He's also got an alternate thwipping left hand, but that's it. I know you were spending a lot on paint masks, Hasbro, but he spends the majority of the movie unmasked: we couldn't get an alternate head?
Articulation is the usual stuff - head, neck, shoulders, biceps, elbows, wrists, chest, waist, hips, thighs, knees, boots, ankles - but the plastic used for the joints is really rubbery, meaning holding poses isn't always easy.
There's no Build-A-Figure for this series, so you only have to pick up the figures you like. Movie Spider-Punk is possibly the only time a mass market pop culture product has had an anarchist character who was treated seriously and not as a joke or parody or even a villain. He was the anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian, community-action hero people didn't know they wanted, and a billion-dollar movie allowed good ideas to be shown as good ideas, even if they weren't aligned with the goals of the company that made it. Across the Spider-Verse is the most anti-"copaganda" piece of mainstream fiction we've seen in recent memory, and Hobie might as well be the Spider-Man of Earth 1312, if you get me. The comic version was a cool design, but the movie made him a cool character. And even if the toy can't duplicate what we saw on the screen, it's still an awesome thing to get.
Just don't buy it.
-- 06/26/23
|
