Tuesday, 13 October 2015

POP! Marvel: Frost Giant Loki (glow in the dark variant)

Company: Funko
Series: POP! Marvel
Year: 2014

I have always had mixed feelings about Marvel’s take on Norse mythology. Though I don’t mind the Ancient Aliens take that the Cinematic Universe has offered, and the “Is Thor legit or crazy?” take from The Ultimates, the mainstream universe version has never really grabbed me. So if you had told me a few years ago that I would be buying anything to do with Marvel’s Loki, I would have laughed in your face.

Yet here I am. One of the best things about 2012’s The Avengers was Tom Hiddleston’s take on Loki. It retained a lot of the character’s visual trappings, but upgraded for more modern sensibilities and made them much cooler, at least to my eye. So three years on I’ve finally picked up a Funko POP of him – albeit one that seems to be based on a moment that I don’t think ever actually happened in the movie. Why, you ask? Well, he glows in the dark. The regular Loki is still a pretty cool POP, but I needed something to bump it up to the next level before I was willing to take the plunge – long-term readers of the site will recall that I am a glow in the dark tragic

Paint is a little tricky to judge – most of the paint on his body is fine, though there’s some fuzziness here and there; nothing too major. The face and helmet are a different story; he’s got a bit of paint missing on the top of his helmet and he’s got some missing on the area of the helmet covering his cheekbones. It’s not terribly noticeable in the photos, and I didn’t notice it in the box – but now I’ve seen it, it bugs me a lot. I may end up repainting the whole helmet and doing a pseudo-custom.
There are now a whole bunch of different Lokis from Thor: The Dark World – there’s the regular version, the B&W version, the Frost Giant version and the one reviewed today. All use the same sculpt; there’s an unhelmeted Loki from the first Thor movie, which I believe had a few variants too. This particular variant isn’t terribly rare. I’d say I’ve maybe seen 1 or 2 for every 5 regular Frost Giant Lokis, though this is far from an exact figure. The glow is – as you might expect – fun but not amazing. It looks like it needs an awful lot of light to get a good glow going. It’s better than Ant-Man was, but it’s no Gillman. But it looks virtually identical to the regular Frost Giant version, so why not just get this one instead?

This was a good POP for me to get personally, as I’m not so invested in Loki as a character and didn’t really need a “standard” version of him. He’s a fun, but non-essential variant; just make sure you check the paint more carefully than I did -- and don't pay some crazy aftermarket price for him either.    

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