[AdrienVeidt]

DCIH Adam Strange. Pretty much an absolutely worthless pile of hot dogshiat. He was the first DCIH fig I got, and I kept looking at him thinking there just *had* to more to the fig than I was seeing in the package; but being a customizer I figured I'd be able to do something with him to improve his lackings.

Once I got him home and out, I could see just how little there was to appreciate. As the fig is, pretty much all I liked was the helmet sculpting detail and the vibrant colors (which are of the keen Pascal Ferry uniform Dan Didio no doubt killed in favor of his stupid '60s uniform because Didio worships the Silver Age like Paris Hilton does cawk).

I tried to pry the head off and didn't realize Mattel tought they were designing a new security feature for Fort Knox so I had to use all my mighty strength to get it off, only to watch it go flying across the room to never be seen again. Bummer, dammit, and damnation; but at least I can use the harness and rockets, right?

The good thing is that the harness fight nicely on the BnB Edge fig I was using; but the rockets and the struts supporting them are made of such crappy low-density plastic you'd think they were making it out of that Memory Foam the Swedes use to make mattresses. The spongey struts meant the rockets were pointing off in any direction that wasn't Up. So, they had to go and I ended up using a hacked-up 25A jetpack from a MASS Device set Stalker, iirc.

So, ultimately, I paid my $5 for the right to throw away the entire figure except for the chest harness itself. The figure was uselessly and pointlessly articulated (joints don't count if the fig looks stupid in anything but one pose, imho). Hell, the head couldn't even look up for a proper flying pose. Then the rockets were unusable due to being flippy-floppy like, well, your grandma's flippy-floppy bits.

I had a real difficult time plonking down my money for the Hawkman 3pack, but I did it due to my love of Hawkman and great liking of Ferry's redesign of the Thanagarian warriors. Until I'm seriously impressed by this hypothetical improvement in articulation Mattel promised once Hasbro unveiled the MU figs at SDCC and made them look like the chumps they are; I'm gonna stick with customizing my own DCU figs and saving my money to give to Hasbro.

Mattel has *never* made an 18th fig that was remotely comparable to the state-of-the-art. Every action figure they've ever made in 18th scale has completely sucked.