Queen Medusa sits atop the throne of Attilan with the prehensile hair gifted her by exposure to the Terrigen Mists along with fellow member of the Inhuman Royal Family Gorgon who can create kinetic shockwaves with his hooved feet.
"So here we go, another Inhumans two-pack, another figure we're forced to rebuy in order to get something new. At least Medusa isn't as bad as Black Bolt, because while he had a mass-market
figure, both of hers were exclusives, so this will be a lot of fans' first shot at her. Still, for anyone who does have those, she's a pretty big waste of time."
At least, that's what I would be saying, if I wanted to be completely wrong. It's what I thought until I bought this set and opened it, at which point I learned absolutely none of this figure is taken from the old version(s). The body is newer, with more articulation - no shins, despite her boots being perfect for them, but there is a hinged waist to supplement the balljointed chest, and there are pectoral hinges to increase the range of motion on the arms. And just wait, there's something else we'll be mentioning later. She's wearing her late-80s costume, which has bare arms and legs, and a stylized M belt. The black sections on her gloves are raised elements, but if they're not aligned properly on your Medusa, don't worry: the "gloves" are separate pieces slipped onto the forearms, so you can fix that. The black details at the top of her boots are the same way.
Neither of the previous Medusae had swappable head, because that would be stupid to attempt with her hair. And so naturally, this one doesn't get swappable heads, either: instead she has swappable faces! The
only other Marvel Legend to have that feature before was MODOK, so this is a creative move! You get your choice of angry or haughty faces, and the black mask she's wearing helps keep the appearance looking seamless. The faces connect with just a single large block, so sometimes they fall off too easily, but it's still cool to see something new being tried. Maybe eventually we can finally get an Iron Man with a separate faceplate!
Medusa's hair swirls in the same direction as the previous figures', first to the right, then to the left, and curling back around
to the right down by her ankles. It's a much thicker mane this time, both taller and wider, and has more loose tendrils waving about. Unfortunately, the hair doesn't come all the way down to the ground anymore, so she's more prone to falling over without it acting as a support for the figure. However, there's also a feature no Medusa has had before: her hair is actually articulated! It's nothing major, just a single large hinge allowing the lower half to bend side-to-side, and it doesn't really look great in practice, but the closest any toy has come to this before is a spinning base with ToyBiz's 1996 Fantastic Four cartoon line. Credit to them for at least trying something new.
This set costs more than the Black Bolt/Triton set, which seems ridiculous since the two were released at the same time and should therefore be part of the same "series," but it makes sense once you see Gorgon in person: dude is the size of a Build-A-Figure! He's always been the Inhumans' heavy hitter, so that works, but it's still surprising to see just how large they made him. His official height is 6'7", and even accounting for Marvel Legends' size creep, being nearly 9" tall is approximately 2" bigger than it should be. He's closer to Marvel Select scale than Marvel Legends.
With her hair powers, Medusa really feels like she should be more of a "Godiva," and similarly, having goat legs is more
"satyr" than "Gorgon." This figure shows him in his costume from the same era as Medusa, which is nice - he's had some pretty crumy redesigns over the years, with a lot of them making him look like Hercules unless his feet were specifically on-panel, so this "tunic and shawl" look is a much better choice for a toy. If we're going by the OHotMU Master Edition art that seems to have inspired the figure, he should have black markings on the back of his shirt to match those on the front, but maybe that part of the budget went to painting his arm hair. It also would have been nice if they'd done something with the small straps running up the front of each pantleg.
Gorgon doesn't get an alternate head or an alternate face - maybe they could have afforded that if they'd made him the right size? Seriously,
was this planned as a BAF at one point? Hasbro loves making those too big to appease the "Build-A-Figures need to be larger than regular figures" crowd, even when that choice is wrong and stupid, I mean, we've got three other Inhumans released at the same time, that's half a series right there. Use the Beyonder head to make Maximus the Mad, throw in a couple other "cosmic" characters, like Rom or Adam Warlock, and you'd be set. But see, this is why you don't sculpt your BAFs bigger "just because": because if the plan changes, you're stuck releasing a mold that's blatantly the wrong size for no reason.
That, though, is unfair of us to say.
We probably wouldn't be getting this Gorgon at all if he weren't this size: the chest and arms are the ones Caliban and Drax used, with Gorgon even wearing Caliban's bracelets; it's not that Hasbro chose to make Gorgon this size by himself, they sized the new legs, head, and clothing to go along with the torso they already had. But hey, at least the new legs aren't missing any of the articulation! Balljoint, hips, swivel thighs, double-hinged knees, swivel shins (yay!), and swivel/hinge hooves in addition to the existing wrists, elbows, biceps, shoulders, and neck.
Gorgon includes one accessory, his mace. You know, Gorgon's mace. Gorgon's mace! An accessory that's every bit as iconic and indispensible as Wolverine's guitar. What? You say you don't know Wolverine's guitar? Cool, see if you can extrapolate any parallels out of that fact. Technically this is something he's used in the comics, circa 2010's "Realm of Kings" event, but it took like 20 minutes of searching for me to find even that scant information. The head of the weapon is molded from translucent green plastic, to suggest it's glowing with energy, but that leads to a problem:
See, the mace is metal, grey metal, like we see on the handle here, and it simply gets covered in green energy - the few comics where this appears depicted that like a big metal ball with green lighning crackling around it. This look, fully green, seems to be based on the appearance in Ultimate Alliance 3, which, unfortunately, was a bad choice.
Whoever designed the deco misread the game art, not understanding that it was trying to show a solid item with some glowing lights on its surface. The lighting in the game model created a highlight on the front, something this toy copies by putting a little bit of silver paint in the center. And it looks awful. It looks incomplete. Frankly, they either needed to pay to paint every panel all the way around, or they needed to mold it in color and paint green dots at every vertex. Or better yet, don't bother making this at all and give us a second Gorgon head in its place. Nobody associates Gorgon with a mace. Nobody would miss it if it weren't here. He's got an alternate right hand to hold it, and the fingers aren't even all open wide enough to do so! Gah! Just a waste, all around.
This is a weird set, for reasons entirely related to the comics and not the toys: namely, of the two characters presented here, one of them is associated with the word "Medusa" and one of them is associated with the word "Gorgon," but they're not the same character? And neither of them have anything to do with turning people to stone. Gorgon is oversized and wastes budget on an accessory that means nothing, but Medusa is way beyond the boring re-release it seemed like she would be. And amazingly, Hasbro has become the first company ever to actually complete the full Inhumans team, and that's pretty cool.
-- 04/06/26
Do you think Stan and Jack were confused when they named these two? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.
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