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Series: Marvel Legends
Year: 2024
Prelude: Not a bounty hunter, yes? Freelance Peacekeeping Agent! You got the money, Death’s Head will bring in the target, no matter what planet or time period they are hiding in. Doesn’t matter if it’s giant transforming robots from outer space, time travelers in little blue boxes, gamma-irradiated lawyers, or super-powered families wearing matching jumpsuits with numbers on them. Death’s Head always gets his man and now he’s got a Marvel Legends figure to boot. So let’s say go, yes?
Figure: Death’s Head Marvel Legends figure is a massive beast. He stands almost a full head taller than your normal, human-sized Marvel Legends characters, which fits with his portrayal in the comic books. It also makes him about the size of a large Transformers Voyager-Class figure, a head taller than Rodimus Prime and still slightly taller than Galvatron, two characters he clashed with during his run in the Transformers UK comics (more on that below). Personally I can fully live with that scale, as Death’s Head was shown to be a big brute in the TF comics, too, but I know some people would have preferred him a tad smaller.
Color-wise Death’s has his Marvel Universe look, meaning he is a grey mechanoid with blue and yellow clothes and a red cape. Originally Death’s Head looked a bit more robotic and had a mostly green torso and grey boots and gloves, but they changed his look once he entered the Marvel Universe proper and began to tussle with Marvel superheroes. At least he got to keep the red cape. Said cape looks worn and has some burn marks on it, very nicely done, and his blue shoulder pads have what looks like bullet holes in them, too. Both the cape and the shoulder pads can be removed if you wish. I wish the shoulder pads would clip into his back a bit more solidly, but that’s just a minor thing.
Of course Death’s Head’s most distinguishing feature is his head with the red horns, the big eyebrows, and that lower jaw with the big tusks. They gave him an angry look for this figure, which looks great, but it would have been nice to have a replacement head with some different facial expressions. For a robot, Death’s Head’s face was very expressive in the comics, especially the eyebrows. The rest of the figure looks muscular and strong, with spiked blue gloves and boots. Death’s Head comes with several replacement hands in order to hold his weapons, gesture, or simply ball his fists.
Speaking of weapons, Death’s Head was known in the comics to carry all sorts of weapons, most of them designed to be plugged into his wrists. This figure carries a mace, a missile, and an axe. I’m kind of missing the Titanium Shott Blaster (the gun that blew up Shockwave), but I can live with that. All three weapons can be stored in the shield Death’s Head carries on his back. Of course he can also hold the shield in hand and I love that they sculpted battle damage into the shield, too.
Articulation of the figure is pretty good, even if his bulk somewhat limits him here and there (his biceps prevents him from bending his elbow more than 90 degrees). He has double knee joints, too, though they are very, very stiff. The joints connecting the legs to the hip, on the other hand, could be a bit stiffer, as they are somewhat loose. Not loose enough to impede his balance or anything, but still. He also has jointed hands and feet, so all sorts of poses are possible.
So bottom line: very nice. I would have preferred Death’s Head with the original green paintjob, simply because that’s how he looked when he interacted with the Transformers, but regardless of that I like this figure a lot. Some minor drawbacks, but overall it get’s a thumbs up from me.
Packaging: I don’t usually spend much (if any) time on reviewing the packaging a figure comes in, but I have to make an exception here. Death’s Head box looks like one of those 90s trading cards, giving us a look at the character in question, his stats (though they neglect to mention which bar is for what) and a short description of the character and his abilities. They also list the first appearance, which, in Death’s Head’s case, is entirely wrong. His first appearance in a Marvel comic was not in Dragon’s Claws, but more than a full year earlier (see below). Apart from this glaring error, though, a very nice box.
Remarks: Death’s Head’s history is pretty long and complicated. He was conceived as a one-time character for the Marvel UK licensed Transformers comics and debuted in issue 113 (May 1987). Now normally that would have meant that the copyright for the character belonged to Hasbro (similar to Impactor and Straxus, for example), but in Death's Head case Marvel retained the copyright. How they did it is a bit of a mystery. Many sources say that his actual first appearance was in a one-page short story called “High Noon Tex”, written by Simon Furman and published in several Marvel UK comics before his Transformers appearance (much like Circuit Breaker appeared in Marvel’s Secret Wars II before turning up in the Transformers US comic), but others say that story wasn't actually drawn until 1988. So... who knows? Either way, Death’s Head was portrayed as a robotic bounty hunter (but never call him that!) with a penchant for rhetorical questions (he puts a “…, yes?” at the end of every other sentence), who kills people (and robots) purely for money.
Despite originally being conceived as a one-off character, Death’s Head proved popular enough that he had a year-long run in the Transformers Marvel UK Comics, mostly in the future timeline set in the far-off year of 2006, battling Rodimus Prime, Galvatron, Scourge, Cyclonus, and Shockwave. After a battle with Unicron he fell through an unstable time portal, encountered the Time Lord known as the Doctor (Marvel had that license, too, back then), was shrunk down to human size, and finally entered the Marvel Universe proper (in Dragon’s Claws #4, October 1988) where he encountered, among others, the Fantastic Four, Ironman 2020, and She-Hulk. And that was just the 1980s. We’re not going to go into the whole Death’s Head II stuff here.
Side note: the yellow-and-blue look for Death’s Head was introduced shortly after his entering the Marvel Universe, probably to make him look a bit less robotic and more super-heroic, if that makes sense.
In closing I can only say that I am happy we are getting a great Death’s Head figure in proper scale to interact with the Transformers. I would have preferred him in his original green colors (see Anubis), but maybe we’ll get a repaint of this figure with that paintjob somewhere down the line. Death’s Head was available at the San Diego Comic Con and then found his way to Hasbro Pulse, where he quickly sold out (I managed to get one, thankfully) but can now be preordered once again. And who knows, maybe we’ll see him appear in the MCU one of these days. I mean, we got Groot and Taser Face, so everything is possible!
Final verdict: well worth getting for every fan of the Freelance Peacekeeping Agent, yes!
Rating: B+
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