Moira MacTaggert

We are currently in the most creative and exciting period for X-Men comics since Chris Claremont left the books (the first time), and it's all the fault of one woman. Through the course of many lives and deaths, Moira MacTaggert pursues justice for all mutants. In one of the biggest retcons to ever hit comics, it was revealed that Moira MacTaggart, the X-Men's human friend, was not actually human; she's a mutant, and has been since she was first introduced in 1975. Her power is reincarnation: she's born, lives a full life, and dies, only to find herself back in her mother's womb, waiting to be born again. She retains all her memories and is fully sentient right from the beginning, allowing her to apply the scientific method to modern history, trial-and-error-ing her way through human/mutant relations. That's a drastic reimagining of the story we thought we knew, and it turned out awesome. Fittingly, this set allows us to make two different versions of Moira: one as a young woman, and one more traditionally mature. The body is the same used for Gwen Stacy, with the sweater and skirt. When the first images of the figure were revealed, it seemed like she used Gwen's coat, too, but this is a new mold: it's got no belt, a smaller collar, and has several pens in the breast pocket. It definitely looks like the woman we always saw hanging around in labs and looking into microscopes for decades' worth of stories. For a more youthful look, you can pop the arms out, slip off the jacket, and swap in the alternate arms that match her sweater - complete with a matching knit texture! That's good attention to detail. In the comic, this outfit was green, not pink and maroon, but these colors do come straight off one of the variant covers. Young Moira is also wearing a white scarf, which ends up looking more like a bandana here. It's not the same piece Silk had, because that one lacked the trailing ends of the tie on the side that this one has. But just taking off a single piece of outerwear is not enough to turn a PhD into an undergrad, so we've also got heads. Since she's in doctor mode in the packaging, she's got her hair down and is wearing glasses, a fairly common look for her in past stories. The only thing she's missing is the headband that pushed her hair back behind her ears, but it's not like that was always there or anything. The alternate head loses the glasses, because she was younger and her eyesight was better, and she adds a floppy white hat to her ensemble. The faces are not just the same sculpt (baby Moira wears huge disc earrings under her hair, while mama Moira is more conservative with her jewelry, for instance), but they look similar enough to make it clear they're two distinct versions of herself. Once you discount all the various extra bodyparts, Moira X's only accessory is a book. A plain blue-grey book with a golden atom on the cover. Is it something she's studying as a student? Is it her notes as a scientist? The set only has one hand shaped to hold anything, ad it's on the left sweater arm, but you can trade the hands out so the coat arm could hold it as well. The Build-A-Figure for this series is the story's version of a Tri-Sentinel, and Moira gets the left leg. The joint "House of X"/"Powers of X" story was, in a word, ambitious. X-Men is at its best, as a comic, when it's on the verge of losing everything, when no one cares what happens to it. As a flagship title (cf. "the '90s") it needs to be safe and it needs to be sanitary; as a property starting to feel the shadow of cancelation, it's free to go wild. It's been a while since readers actually cared much about the X-Men, but Moira Kinross Cowan MacTaggert and her nine lives have brought them back, so it's only fitting she'd get her first action figure because of it. -- 05/24/21

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