Official solicit:

NEW TEEN TITANS SERIES 2: DEATHSTROKE

Slade Wilson has made it his mission to destroy The New Teen Titans now that his son, Grant, died during his own attempt to defeat the group.

One of the most popular Teen Titans storylines of all time appears in 3-D, with female assassin Terra infiltrating the Teen Titans as a spy for Deathstroke, thus threatening the lives of Robin, Jericho, and the rest of the team! The Deathstroke figure stands at 6.75″, and each figure features multiple points of articulation and a base.

Based on the art of George Perez!

May 2008
MSRP 13.99USD

Ever since my high school years in the early 90’s, I’ve been fond of Deathstroke. I wasn’t much into DC during the 80’s, because I had good taste even then, so I missed out on his early years. However, by all accounts, the character of Slade Wilson wasn’t really fleshed out until much later, in the pages of his own comic which debuted in 1991, written by his creator Marv Wolfman. Something of an answer by DC at the time to Marvel’s anti-hero popularity contest, guys like The Punisher, Ghost Rider, Wolverine etc, Deathstroke too was that shade of villain but with a heart of gold! Oh boy!

In the years since, he’s been played more and more as strictly a villain, or a gun-for-hire for the bad guys, but he’s still always just been Slade Wilson to me. And now we get an unmasked Deathstroke figure, enter Slade Wilson!

Even though this is dubbed Series 2 of The New Titans line, I’m not really sure what DC Direct considers Series 1. There was a Contemporary Teen Titans line a few years back in 2004, which also featured a Deathstroke figure as well. This Deathstroke is essentially the same figure as the Contemporary Titans figure, only with the new Slade head, and a slightly altered/better paint job.

Sculpted by James Shoop and Jonathan Matthews, Deathstroke comes with - SURPRISE - his patented sword and a sawed-off shotgun too (as well as a Titans-logo standing base - not picture). Accessories are a rarity for DC Direct figures from my experiences, so this is a welcome addition! As you can see, his sword fits snugly into this munitions belt clip on the back, although there is nowhere for the shotty to go.

Deathstroke stands at an impressive 6.75 inches tall, but only comes with 13 points of articulation. Paint apps and details are great, a much better improvement over the other version of this figure in my opinion. My two complaints about paint on this are; he could use a variation of details in the hair instead of the straight white paint, AND most of the figure is painted in a flat finish (except for his chain-mail armor), but for some reason the feet of the boots have a glossy finish - and it looks really off (more so in real life than in the pictures, trust me!). Not sure why this was done, or not fixed, but every version I’ve seen suffers from it, so it clearly was done intentionally. Bad call there.

As for his accessories, the sword and shotgun are made from that softer, cheap sort of rubber that bends and warps easily. So the shotgun that came with mine was bent crooked and wouldn’t stay straight no matter how much I bent into the right direction. Talk about hanging a bit to the left, yeah? I’m not sure why in this day and age, we’re still getting accessories made from this material, because it’s no secret that it has these kinds of problems, especially when the toys are geared towards a collectors market like these are, vs. retail/younger crowds. Is a harder plastic really that much more expensive?

Posability is where this figure falls short. 13 points of articulation should be enough to get some range out of this guy, but the choices in types of joints used are just peculiar, and limiting. His head isn’t on a ball joint, so he can only move that left to right. His shoulders are on a ball joint, but that doesn’t extend much past about 20 degrees away from his body (as you can see in the picture about 2nd from right, that’s as far away from his body the arms extend) which is disappointing. Because of the sculpt of the posture, Deathstroke also suffers from severe bowleggedness, which seems to be a recurring problem in figures sculpted by Jonathan Matthews (although in fairness to Matthews, he possibly/probably only sculpted the new head on this figure, leaving the original body work being done by James Shoop.). A problem that would be easily enough solved by giving the ankles ball-joints so the feet could compensate for the weight and stance changes, but basically if Deathstroke isn’t standing exactly like he is in the pictures above, he’s falling over. BOOM.

And while he does come with the Titans logo stand (not pictured - but has a peg which fits into the hole in Deathstrokes feet to give him stability), you’re really going to need it to get any bended-knee poses out of Deathstroke, because standing is pretty much all he does. And even then, not so well - balance issues aplenty with this guy.

One thing I’m puzzled by, is there are cut-joints at the point where his gloves meet his forearms, yet not where his boots meet the top of his shins - which would have helped with the weight/stance issues immensely. Just seems like especially lazy design issues on the part of this figure overall.

In the end, we have another great looking figure from DC Direct, but one that doesn’t do much of anything. Transformers collectors refer to figures like this as “bricks”, and I think the term works fine for this guy too. And it seems to be a recurring problem with DC Direct figures, new and old. And that’s a problem I don’t really understand, because these are specialty market items, you have to actually search them out to buy them, not just waddle into your local Target or Walmart etc.

So why DC Direct isn’t putting that extra little bit of attention into the figures it releases, refining the smaller details to perfection ASIDE from spending so much time and energy on getting the sculpts accurate, just doesn’t really make any sense to me. And that accuracy is a nice touch, this really does look like a George Perez drawing brought to life, but the problem is, with just a little teeeeeeeny bit more work, this could have been a great action figure as well. We’re talking with the addition of 2 or 4 more points of articulation, or even changing the sorts of points you already have. I mean, in this day and age, are statues and busts really that expensive? I see them all over the place, for varying degrees of price, but certainly affordable. Factor in ebay and most fans are able to snag statues from Bowen Designs even for a steal. Which makes me think that if DC Direct was interested in just producing a line of miniature statues, why don’t they just do that then? Because that’s really all they’re doing here, and with most of their figures I run across - little rubber statues that can move their arms or heads, if only a little bit.

Such a shame, because they have the right designers and characters to make some of the greatest action figures that there could ever be, beating NECA, McFarlane, and Hasbro too if they wanted. It just doesn’t seem like they really want to though.

Oh well, at least they look nice, right?