.

The packaging is the now standard window box with control art below the windows which allow you to see the Minimates themselves. They also have mini-bios on the back which tells you a little about each character, something I always find useful.

Confession time – I’ve not read Secret Wars, the 1984 storyline that pitted Earth’s mightiest superheroes and villains against each other at the behest of a being known as the Beyonder. So with no actual knowledge (or indeed, interest) in the character of Molecule Man, all I’ve got to go on is if the Minimate looks like it should do. If the pic on the mini-bio is accurate – and a quick image search shows it is – then it does.

There is a lot of detail on the face of Owen Reece, the Molecule Man. Initially it looks as though his face is over-detailed, but closer inspection reveals that most of his craggy expression are actually detailing lines that zigzag like lightning bolts. The hairpiece is a reuse of Peter Venkman’s hair from the Ghostbusters line.

The costume is pure silliness, even by 1980s standards. The colours are dark green and purple, the unwieldy-looking zigzag motif on the costume is represented by Lady Deathstrike’s V-piece which goes over the chest block. It’s a good choice as it was a raised element on the source material. Molecule Man’s ridiculous ensemble is completed with a skirt piece. The big plus point here is that the paint is good, there are no badly-applied areas at all. A top job.

Molecule Man has no accessories.

In conclusion, the figure seems to be a good representation of the character. A solid but uninspiring Minimate, this is one for Secret Wars fans only.

MMC Score – 6 out of 10

This is the second version of Julia Carpenter’s Spider-Woman. The first one was wave 10’s variant figure. As mentioned a few times on this site, DST’s policy on the variant figures from each wave is that they will never be reissued in their original form. However, that hasn’t stopped DST from creating new versions of previous variants. The irony is that Spider-Woman II was the variant figure of Spider-Woman 1, and the first variant figure to be a completely different character (previously, the variants were costume changes only). Now she’s back again, but in a similarly hard-to-get fashion.

Variant figures don’t tend to get new pieces used on them, so the original Julia Carpenter Minimate got New X-Men Jean’s hair, same as every other female in that wave. However this new version gets something exciting – a new hairpiece. This one is a ponytail, which reflects how she appeared during the Secret Wars. It’s a lovely piece, the only drawback being the very visible molding lines. I’m sure we’ll be seeing this one reused again.

It would have been easy for DST to simply reuse the detailing from the original figure with this new hairpiece and call it job done, but they haven’t. The face is more detailed, with areas highlighted around her cheeks and shadowing on her lips. Likewise, the body detailing is new, and adds more chest definition than before, striving for the newer, detailed Minimate aesthetic. The white spider symbol goes round the sides of the chest block and appears on the back too, something that the original lacked. The paint job is very good, with no bleeding between the white and black areas.

Spider-Woman has no accessories.

In conclusion, this newer version of Julia Carpenter improves on the original figure by being more accurate to the source material, and so becomes the definitive version of the character, executed superbly with modern Minimate standards.

Review and pictures by Danny Mills

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