MM is for Miss Marple . . . no; Marvelous Missus . . . no; Mrs. Marmite . . . Miriam Margoles . . . Doh!

Love her or hate her; it's all too silly for words, but blurb has to be produced or procured and a bit of controversy at the start of the year is no bad thing!

This Phidal set was reduced to £2.50p in the post-Christmas shelf-clear at TK Maxx the other day, and was the only reason I bought it, having rejected it several times at full-price over the last year or so.

Carol Danvers - Captain Marvel

The reasons why I kept not buying it when I saw it, include the fact that it was one of the rarer sets with only ten 'figurines' (instead of the normal 12) for the money and the fact that it's one of the even rarer sets which are 'blind-bag' screened so you don't know what's in them, which meant it could have been one of the sets containing 'semi-deforms' - which are not somewhere I want the collection to go particularly!

I don't know why a few sets have this blind layout, but interestingly the only other one I've purchased cheap, was one reduced after being damaged by someone browsing in-store, who forced the corner of the cover up and couldn't get it back resulting in a clearance price-reduction. . . one of the DC sets we looked at last year?

That the one was forced and the other end-of-year cleared, would suggest they aren't a popular move by Phidal, and one hopes they will be phased-out? Presumably they are aimed at generating hype through 'influencer' box-opening on social media?

New superhero -

The Amazing Morphing-Hips'n'Hair Woman

Anyway, having had a dig at the packaging, let me be equally unhappy with the contents, firstly - as I've said -  we only get ten not twelve items; the normal count for a My Busy Book, secondly, of all the poorer or sillier characters to come out of the DC-Marvel 'verses, the main one here takes the biss'quit . . . she 'Carol Danvers' (I'm sure?) used to be a he, she's taken Superman (from DC)'s colour-scheme, Han Solo (Star Wars-Lucas)'s waist-belt arrangement and also has some of the same sort of superpowers as Clarke Kent (no x-ray vision); in short - she's a formulaic, derivative, wet-nurse's pap!

Also she's a Captain? In the Air Forces you have Flight Lieutenants, Wing-thingies and Squadron- or Group Wottsits and Air Commanders or Commodores; not Captains (actually you do get Group Captains - Doh!, but they're older pilots). AND . . . she doesn't get her superpowers until she's gone civilian anyway, so, even if the USAF has flying Captains, it's a spurious rank, and people look down on retirees who hang-on to such lowly ranks anyway, my parents generation where always slighting Mark Philips for hugging his captaincy! Airline and Ship's captains are the exceptions which prove the rule!

In the above image we see her as Air Force- (green, 'who ate all the pies' Carol), Civilian- (blue-jean, 'Helen DeGeneres' Carol) and Superheroine (spandex body-suit, 'cosplay porn-toob' Carol) to the right, with another member of the Alpha Flight team on the far left.

While here we see Ultron in the middle (who in the best traditions of Spandex Comics Inc., proved to be anything other than 'ultra'!), flanked by two Kree, one of whom (on the right) is probably Captain (aliens have the same ranking system!) Mar-Vell (geddit!), expect a Captain De-Cee any day now.

Below the aliens are two Ultron-Bots (useful with Star Wars Micromachines!) and Captain Carol's fighter (which will end-up in the drawer with the Galoob and Mattel micro-aircraft).

Now, I guess the whole trope behind superhero comics is to keep some crippled kid on a trailer-park - with a vicious, feckless step-father and junkie-mother (or vice-versa) - dreaming the 'American Dream (Princess Perfect-Pilot's a true 'patriot' by the way), but the whole by-the-numbers plotting leaves me cold, comic heroes here or in Europe have always been either anti-heroes working to straighten the State, or normal citizens like Tin-Tin, or rebels . . . or drunken, divorcees with issues!

The reason I make an exception for 'old' Batman is because the TV series had obvious, for entertainment, over-the-top humour to take your mind off both the implausibility of it all and the plot-hole craters.

And if you're wondering why I'm being so cynical today, a quick check of past superhero posts will show you the subject often triggers my inner-curmudgeon and I'm full of deadly Asian-radish, extreme-cold-man-flu-lurggie!

However, another point, raised before but worth a repeat; whatever my (or your) thoughts on the background subject matter, or 'blind' purchases, by the time you've got them home and unpacked; you get a bunch of high quality figures (whether ten or twelve) for the price of one [Russian] 'new-production' figure, or about one-eighteenth of the price of a King & Country radio operator!

That's not to be sniffed at.

While the number of these sets issued so far, now make Phidal more prolific for both number of sculpts and number of sets, than Airfix were in their early 70's 54mm heyday, just because they aren't WWII or Wellingtonians doesn't mean the 'hobby' - as a market  . . . for kids - is not perfectly healthy, despite what you may read elsewhere.