[En Sabah Nerd]

Found a whole case of the new retro spidey assortment at Walmart yesterday. My only "must get" figures of the wave are Shocker and black suit Spidey so obviously I scooped them up. I passed on the previous retro Spidey because I was still let down by the elbow pin color mismatch which I feel like one day they'll do right, and then something felt a little off about the head. So this is my first Spidey on the new body and while it's pretty quality it only feels like a slight improvement in the grand scheme, this speaks to just how well the line has been going thus far so I'm not complaining. This has always been my favorite (or sometimes second favorite) costume of his though so I've got no qualms with having him three times now from Hasbro. It's nice to have all the spidey hands at once for this look too instead of having to get them from multiple releases.

Shocker is another totally new dedicated sculpt for a villain (he is in fact in the same tier as Dr Doom and Kang so he merits it) but they did sacrifice wrist articulation down to just a swivel to better serve the aesthetics of the toy. I still don't think the Kirby crackle effects are a great fit to the character but they already made an entirely new figure so I guess new effect pieces were out of the question. I don't think it's fair to compare this figure to the Sandman BAF wave version since they each represent totally different looks for the guy but Shocker's one of my favorite Spidey villains so I appreciate the classic version along with the modern.