It was only a week ago when we got the official announcement and pre-order of the Giant-Man and Wasp two-pack, so I was very confused when I ordered and couldn’t find the estimated pre-order release date. It didn’t occur to me at first that they’d actually be in stock and ship to me within a week. Even for an in-stock item these got to me faster than the usual Pulse order so this was a very pleasant experience all around. Let’s take a look at Giant-Man and the Wasp!
The box is kind of fun because it has the vibes of the Avengers 60th Anniversary line whereas that line was plastic free and we have the more traditional Marvel Legends two-pack window box here with the 60th color scheme.
Hank and Janet come with a good amount of stuff including alternate heads and sets of hands for both, two flasks, a datapad, a mini-Quinjet, removeable wings for Wasp, and a lab coat. Hank has two grasp hands, one left fist and one right grip hand and I do wish they would have made two grips for the accessory holding rather than two claw-like grasping hands. Well, if I had my druthers, I’d have two fists, two grips, and two clawed hands. Janet gets fists and the oft-repeated female splayed finger open hand. I tend to think of Janet’s wasp sting power as being used with almost a chopping hand, so I would have liked that.
We’ve seen the flasks before in Legends and these have a slightly different plastic treatment that’s lest translucent and almost pearlescent. The Quinjet and data pad are cast in silvery plastic with a couple paint hits for detail. I didn’t recognize the datapad at first, but the tell-tale honeycomb symbol on the back reminded me of its origin with the A.I.M. Scientist Supreme figure. It’s a nice group of things that work well with the lab coat to give you a good chunk of a lab display.
The lab coat is pretty nice soft goods for this scale and price point. There is a little bit of stiffness and the thread of the seams marks it as out of scale, but I think it’s effective for the most part. It also works pretty well on the West Coast Avengers Hank.
Hank’s unmasked portrait is re-use from the West Coast Avenger’s Hank Pym with a slightly different paint application with lighter and more stern eyebrows. The eye placement and eyebrow change kind of lends a slightly more intense expression than the West Coast Hank. The heads are swappable between the two but it seems to me that the new head sits slightly higher on the West Coast body.
The portraits for Wasp are both quite beautiful and the face printing compliments them really well. Hank looks like he’s based on the same body as the recent Target exclusive Classic Ant-Man, but the colors are slightly different. I suppose they match the Haslab better, but I do wish I could have swapped the hands across figures.
The sculpting on the new Giant-Man masked head matches up well with what we’ve seen of the neutral face on the Haslab, just with less costume thread texture to match up with the smoother base body of the smaller scale figure. Janet has a whole new torso, head, and skirt that conveys her interestingly pointy shoulders and helmet very well. I remember Janet’s shirt as a little less form-fitting than what we have here, but this does look very good and while I’ve never been the biggest fan of this look I think they made it look fantastic here. The antennae are separate pieces that plug into the head and there is a little play to their movement, so I noticed sometimes I got the antennae pointing more straight up and down than is ideal, but they move down into the correct more v-shaped position easily enough.
The articulation is good on these figures with Hank sporting the standard Marvel Legends articulation including double jointed pinless knees and elbows. Janet’s articulation is slightly different in that the neck is a ball and socket and doesn’t have the disc hinge common in Legends figures. She also only has ball and socket waist movement for torso articulation. Both of these limit the flight poseability a bit more than I’d like. We’ve recently seen a similar torso articulation set up with the X-Men ’97 Jean Grey, but this one seems to get even less range of motion than that one with almost no crunch and little backward or tilt movement.
Wasp’s wings have a hinge that plugs into her back and swivels. There are two sets of wings on the one hinge and the smaller set is attached to the larger set and can swivel up and down. You can also pop the smaller wings off for a more classic look. The wings do have a slightly pearlescent translucence to them that I like, though I could have gone for slightly more clear. The headset on Wasp also can swivel.
The paint on these two is great with some pretty striking face printing that makes the figures come alive. The lines are pretty clean for the most part since the figures are often cast in the correct plastic color. One slight issue I have are with the pointy tops of Giant-Man’s boots. It’s just way too obvious that they are painted red on the blue calf and they don’t match great with the red plastic of the boot.
Overall I’m very pleased with this set with the Wasp’s limited torso articulation being the one real downside for me. That said, the overall sculpting and look is so great that it outweighs that disappointment by a country mile. I needed a more classic Janet to go with the Haslab Giant-Man and my classic Avengers in general and she fits the bill nicely. She also looks fantastic with the classic Ant-Man and Avengers and fills out the team nicely.
