I was not familiar with Lilith prior to buying this wave, this purchase was definitely a case of the BAF marketing tool working it’s way on me. To me, Lilith was Dracula’s daughter from Tomb of Dracula, but this version is The Mother of Monsters and she’s a ’90s Ghost Rider villain. I have a huge blind spot in Marvel knowledge for a lot of ’90s stuff, but I did find out Lilith is a big part of the Midnight Sons subset of Marvel comics from back then. Let’s take a look at Lilith!
The box art shows some work that is fairly indicative of the art style of the time and of Lilith’s character in the Midnight Sons related books I read. There’s a lot of her standing about in fog and green flame and looking moody. I’m wondering if the art was edited or this is new art in a ’90s style because in most issues I read, Lilith’s outfit was even more ridiculous with a lot more cleavage showing.
Lilith doesn’t come with much stuff, just two sets of hands and the BAF parts. The hands are familiar, fists and the usual spell-casters, but from what I read Lilith was mostly standing around gesturing in a roughly magical way so they fit. I think an alternate expression would have been nice, especially an angry one. She often seems to be bringing up green magic, so some of those green energy effects wouldn’t have gone amiss.
The BAF arm is nice looking and the sculpting is super sharp. So sharp that it actually put dents in my hand when I assembled him! I’m very pleased with Blackheart so far.
Sculpting feels like a familiar body, but it is effective here. Her design in general kind of confuses me, like what exactly is going on with her head? It kind of looks like she has two horns and there is cloth draped between them which flows out in a hair-like way. Maybe she has an exposed brain under there. At any rate the portrait is nice with an appealingly evil grin and the sculpting portrays the weird hair/rags design from the comics very well. The translucent plastic and sculpted texture almost give the “hair” a crepe feel. Very macabre.
The cape attaches to the peg in the back and swivels and is easily removeable, but stays on pretty well. It stays out of the way of articulation too.
For the most part, I like the paint a lot because I feel like the fishnets are accomplished cleanly and the faceprint has some great eyes and makeup. The neckline of her dress isn’t quite as clean on the chest and I feel like they didn’t really match the comic design there, minimizing the cleavage in much the way they did on the box artwork. It makes me wonder if this is a bit of corporate over-correcting, trying to get ahead of some perceived possible sexism or overly sexualized character design complaints or does the new neckline work better with that base figure. I don’t think it’s a big deal, especially since this is a character I’m not particularly invested in, it’s just something I noticed and am curious about.
The articulation is the new Legends standard with double hinged elbows. I’m so glad that they do that much more often now. The neck is also hinged with a ball joint on top and there’s quite a bit of a gap between the bottom of the head and the top of the neck, so there’s quite a lot of tilt there. The joints are also pinless if that’s important to you. I still don’t love that single mid-torso wobble joint for any sort of crunch movement, but there is decent tilt.
Overall, Lilith is a solid figure that’s a little light on the accessories and could use a little more pizazz. I did give her some green effects for some shots below because I happened to have those handy on my Black Series Morgan Elsbeth. It is nice to get a Ghost Rider villain and I enjoyed reading the Rise of the Midnight Sons crossover. She featured fairly heavily in those books from what I can tell and a lot of the monsters the heroes fought were her “Children”. Reading those books made me want to get a ’90s Johnny Blaze with his cool guy shades, stubble, ponytail, trench coat, and cigarette combo in figure form.
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