My Spider-Man finally arrived today. I'm pretty torn on it. Like usual for Mezco, all the technical aspects of the figure are great and high quality: the tailoring is excellent(the suit is tight yet doesn't seem to restrict joint movement and thus posability), the body they use for him is great (the ankles still need a lot of work but overall the articulation is good and I like the athletic, slender, almost lanky body they used for him), and all the paint and moldings on it are terrific (in particular I love the eyes -- whatever material or paint they used for them make them look like lenses as they should rather than just white parts on a mask).
But there are a lot of design choices and Mez-flair bits that don't work for me. While the difference in materials between his fabric costume and the plastic gloves, boots, and mask aren't quite as noticeable in hand as they are in super bright pictures online it's still noticeable enough that it bothers me. Spider-Man's costume is supposed to be really thin (and outside of the eye lens and the bottom of his booties, mostly the same made of the same material), he even usually wears his booties as socks underneath his regular shoes, and either puts the gloves in his pockets or tucks them into his belt along with his mask. Here, though, the material difference (along with the idiotic decision to make the webbing on the plastic parts raised unlike the fabric parts) makes him look like he's wearing heavy boots, gauntlets, and a helmet.
The material difference aside, the feet look over-designed and I just don't like the look of them. Personally I would've preferred if they did the costume like the Miles Morales and the upcoming black costume ones and made it all fabric save for the head and hands, with the plastic texturing for those two parts matching the fabric as close as possible. Giving him a Peter Parker head and a fabric mask to pull over it would be ideal but I'm not sure they could pull it off well in this scale. Another problem I have with the costume is that nearly any time I pose him I find I have to shift around and futz with the costume a lot, otherwise it'll often look very off-centered and twisted about. The chest / torso area especially is where I usually need to straighten the costume out, else the chest spider looks weird.
Lastly for the costume there's the colors. It feels like they couldn't decide between the typical bright red and blue or the black and darker red of Ditko's original design and thus decided to compromise with a darkish red and a weird dark navy blue. I don't mind the shade of red they used but that navy blue doesn't work well for me. Speaking of Ditko, I kept seeing people call the alternate head the 'Ditko head' but I'm not seeing it. It looks more based on Jack Kirby's design of the costume from the original printed Amazing Fantasy #15 cover than it does Ditko's usual look of the eyes, which tended to have shorter but slightly bigger whites and thicker, very winged black outer parts.
Kirby:
Ditko:
On the topic of the heads, I think they seem a bit too big, which isn't helped at all by the neck also seeming a touch too long. The other accessories are great, though. It comes with all the hands you'd expect him to: web shooting, web swinging/holding, wall crawling, and fists. Then there's a variety of web lines, the most interesting being the long, flexible one. The one missing thing that's hurting it is an unmasked head. Unlike a lot of super heroes, Spider-Man's regular identity of Peter Parker and his social life have always been a major part of the comics. A spider-sense accessory attachment like Daredevil's radar is also something I think this should've had, though the lack of this doesn't bother me as much as the missing unmasked head.
To wrap this up, this overall is a nice figure. For most people it'll probably fill the Spider-Man hole in their Mezco collection nicely or otherwise just be a great Spider-Man figure to own, and it's definitely a fun figure to play around with and pose. For those of us who want a very comic accurate Spider-Man there's a lot of design choices that bother me a lot. With the popularity of Spider-Man I'm hoping that they'll do an updated version of the figure later like they did with the Joker and fix a lot of these issues (I'm hoping they do the same for Superman, too).
I'm still really looking forward to the black costume Spidey that should be releasing soon. With the '80s being one of my favorite Spider-Man eras I might just give this one to my nephew as a birthday present and use the black Spidey as the main one of my collection and hope that they do an updated blue & red one somewhere down the line.
Good rules.
