Marvel Legends Daimon Hellstrom Review |
I have only a passing familiarity with Daimon Hellstrom, and to illustrate how slight my familiarity is, I must confess that for my entire life up until looking at this box I thought his name was Damien Hellstrom! I feel like The Omen’s Damien, also a Son of Satan, must have influenced that slightly embarrassing misapprehension. At any rate, let’s take a look at DAIMON Hellstrom!
The thing that strikes me about the packaging here is that Daimon’s chest symbol in the artwork glows brightly and it makes me wish that there was a bit of a glow effect on the chest symbol for the figure.
Daimon is a pretty lightly appointed figure with one weapon accessory and a spare pair of hands (fists and grips) along with the BAF leg piece. The trident is cast in a slightly gold metallic plastic and fits okay, but I feel like it the grips could stand to be a bit bigger as they don’t fit perfectly. Since Hellstrom tends to point his trident at people and blast them with it, I would have preferred an up/down hinge for the grip hands over the in/out hinge he has so he could better point the thing.
The fists are well proportioned to the body and swap easily enough. Always nice to have the punching option for your heroes.
The BAF leg is appropriately spikey and while some may bemoan the lack of articulation, I was glad to see that the dog-leg portion of his foot is not hinged like the original Legends figure from Toy Biz which makes for a more stable figure. Well, so far. We’ll see how it goes with a big ‘ol head of hair on there.
The body is familiar with parts re-use from Shang-Chi. The bracers and belt dress up his rather meager costume of skin-tight culottes with some similarly slightly metallic detail as the trident.
The highlight here has got to be the enigmatic portrait of Hellstrom himself. He’s got quite a charmingly devilish appearance, which seems appropriate for the son of Satan. In fact, with his wavy hair, pointy ears, slight smile, and square jaw, he might make a nice custom Nightcrawler if repainted.
Paint is okay, like I said before, I think a slight glow effect might have added a lot to the symbol and I’ve never been a big fan of painted nipples on a shirtless character. The best part is also the face which darkens the sockets to highlight the fiery eyes.
The articulation is Legends standard with double knees and elbows moving well, no design features really get in the way of articulation. My only complaint is that grip hands don’t hinge how I’d like and I have to say that after years with ball jointed waist on Classified figures the straight waist cut has become more and more noticeably unattractive.
Overall, Hellstrom is an acceptable, if not terribly exciting, figure. The portrait is really nice, but the figure doesn’t have enough intrinsic interest for me to overcome my ignorance of the character. I did decide to read some Hellstrom comics since his early appearances are drawn by Herb Trimpe, a classic artist that I enjoy quite a bit, so I’m thinking I may gain some post reading appreciation for this one.