Marrow

Okay, but why is she pretty? Once a member of the Morlocks, a community of outcasted mutants, Marrow has the ability to manipulate bone growth. "Outcasted"? That's not a word. Is this A.I.? Did they just put that there so we'd be too distracted to make some kind of joke about her manipulating bone growth? ["Yeah she does!" --ed.] The actual past tense of "outcast" is "outcast." Or if that's too confusing for your sentence structure, "cast out." Hasbro, it's good that you're actually putting bios on the packaging again, but you also need to pay money to a human being who knows what they're doing. There's no way a professional copywriter would think "outcasted" was a word. Even the most basic, low-rent spellcheck in the world will tell you it doesn't exist! Marrow has had one action figure before, long ago in the pre-Legends ToyBiz days, back when all she'd ever been was a villain. In fact, if you've read that old review, you know she was created to be not just a villain, but a fully unlikeable, irredeemable villain, all so Storm would have somebody to kill. And then editorial decided she needed to 1) survive being killed, and 2) be redeemed. Part of that process involved giving her more control over her bone growths, rather than having them be mostly random, because humans find symmetry aesthetically pleasing, and comics have always had a "pretty = good, ugly = bad" approach to their visuals. So now instead of having irregular osseous spikes jutting out of her in odd places, she has a very manicured or curated selection: small plates on her knees, a line conveniently underlining her breasts, and then a few little vertebrae running down the center of her back between the six large bones that now poke out of her shoulderblades like a frill or wings. Those require new sculpts, of course, so while her arms and legs are existing molds, the kneecaps and chest were going to be unique. The surprise is that her lower torso is, too, because the V-shaped belt that wraps around her waist is a sculpted element! That matches the rings around the arm-holes on her shirt, but it's still unexpected that they'd go to the bother of doing that instead of just painting it. Since she wears short gloves, she gets little cuffs that are held onto the wrists by her hands. Unfortunately, Hasbro either misunderstood or chose to ignore part of her mutation. See, "bones" isn't the full extent of it - she also has an unusual skintone. Like, her skin isn't supposed to be a normal human shade of pink: it's slightly more maroon, leaning toward light purple. And on top of that, her hair is naturally pink. This figure, meanwhile, is a white girl with auburn hair, nothing more. It's bad enough they had to do her "fully human and unblemished" face, but to mess up her colors, too? She doesn't look like a mutant outcast cursed by her gifts, she looks like a total smokeshow with powers every goth girl would dream of. You know where she did have skin and hair this color, though? Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Yes, Marrow made it into the lineup of a videogame, and this is the design it chose. Obviously this sculpt doesn't have the same cartoony feeling a true MvC toy would, but the influence is there. Heck, they could have done this one in her proper colors and then repainted her as a "Gamerverse" release! Articulation is the standard stuff, and you can almost even get her into her odd, hunched, MvC idle pose - the underboob ribcage bones keep her from being able to flex her chest forward very far, and the ankles are a little too soft to support her bending over like that. The ankles aren't the only things more pliable than they should be. The six large bones that jut out of her back are soft PVC, surely for safety reasons, but it still means a character with increased bone density as a natural-born power has bones here that can be bent in half with no trouble. That'll be real fun when it's time to put the toy away in storage. The same thing goes for the two bone daggers she comes with as accessories. And alas, unlike the ToyBiz figure (whose bones were molded from a sturdier plastic, as well), she can't actually stick these into her body anywhere for storage. The blades look the same at a glance, but they're actually two unique molds. She has hands that can hold them, or an alternate fist and chopping hand. She also comes with the left arm of this series' Build-A-Figure, Nemesis. And that's got an extra hand, too. Marrow did eventually become a decently interesting character, and her appearance in a videogame tells you she was fairly prominent for a while there, but she was swept aside when the 2001 X-books wanted to be more like the movies, and then had her entire power set usurped by Spyke from X-Men Evolution (which the creators say was unintentional, but come on: he grew bones as weapons, and eventually lost control of his powers and had to go live with the Morlocks) and so faded into obscurity. We don't necessarily need this toy to be her original, super-evil design, but it would have been nice if they'd made her less than beautiful. Or at least included an alternate "angry" head with some bones growing out of it. Maybe then we could overlook the wrong colors. -- 08/04/25