General Marvel Legends

TheSameIdiot said:
To be fair, you do need a Hulk. You can't peruse a Marvel toy forum without a Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Hulk.
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I made that justification when I purchased the Fantastic Four wave that included Retro Doom and High Evolutionary. That wave sucks on toast and I have no vested interest in the F4 whatsoever, but I figured my marvel shelf would be sorely lacking if it didn’t include characters like the Fantastic Four and Namor.


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The bare minimum you need for a Marvel action figure collection is one each of the following:

Spider-Man
Captain America
Thor
Iron Man
Hulk
Thing (to represent the FF)
Wolverine (to represent the X-Men)
Thanos (one heavy-hitter to represent bad guys)

Bare minimum.
 
yojoebro82 said:
The bare minimum you need for a Marvel action figure collection is one each of the following:

Spider-Man
Captain America
Thor
Iron Man
Hulk
Thing (to represent the FF)
Wolverine (to represent the X-Men)
Thanos (one heavy-hitter to represent bad guys)

Bare minimum.
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The only one I disagree with is Thing. Everybody else has a solo title (often more than one) and you can have them in isolation or groups and it's fine (villains don't have to have their own series, they just need to be big time enough they've menaced more than one team of superheroes)

If you have a Ben Grimm and not the other 3 you're a madman. That's like representing The Beatles with only Ringo. Best to have no FF than anything less than 4 of them. You could have an alternate 4. But you can't have just one FF member. That way lies chaos and damnation.
 
Even having Cap, Thor, AND Iron Man seems too heavy for Avengers representation, especially if you’re only having one rep from other teams. I’d say Thor could be dropped from that, but honestly, dropping down to any bare minimum seems unfair, and can really be affected by personal preference.

My literal bare minimum would just be Spider-Man to represent Marvel.
 
CTV said:
What a sausage fest
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This is one reason my collection is predominantly an X-Men collection. Way more women in the rotation. Could sub in Storm for Wolverine and I think you could drop one of the Avengers for Kamala Khan or Carol Danvers.
 
I don't have most of those characters, but then again, I don't claim to have a Marvel collection. I have an X-Men and Spider-Man collection.
 
NORM said:
The Iron Man wave She Hulk was among my top ten last year. I can see F4 She Hulk within the same ranking this year.
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A true FA She Hulk with a new angry head with this body in a soft rubber white onesie next year on a Hulk retro card and she can get this honor 3 years running.

I am in the camp that She Hulk body is WAY too big for Valkyrie. She should be on the Power Princess body.
 
It was pretty straight forward back in the day. Mego came close:

Spider-Man
Captain America
The Falcon
Hulk
Iron Man
Thor
The Fantastic Four
Green Goblin
The Lizard

At that point in time, only Daredevil, Dr, Doom, and maybe the Red Skull belonged in that tier as well. The Lizard, probably not so much, but the Falcon was a big deal back in the day. If you had Captain America, you wanted the Falcon. It was like having Batman without Robin.

Fifty years later, I don’t know what that tier looks like. So many Marvel characters are household names now.
 
Really is era dependent, too. Pre-MCU, who were the most omni-present in various media? Eyeballing I'd guess Spidey, Hulk, and Wolverine. After MCU starts, Cap and Tony added to that list. Somewhere in there you could probably add Deadpool for recognizability but I'd never put him in the essential category He's the salt-to-taste character.

I think one of Marvel's strengths is it doesn't have a holy trinity like DC where everything leads back to, but also that makes it harder to nail down their core characters. (And DC of course then has sort of a magnificent seven for a slightly bigger minimum.) Marvel's more spread out but I like that about it. And yeah, very dude-heavy, but Marvel's never done a great job of fully establishing the "even my mom recognizes her" marquee female character, and a ton of their most iconic women are behind the X-Men label which has its own kinda siloing happening. (I love Widow and Carol as much as anyone, but I don't know that non-comics folks would pick them out of a lineup pre-MCU.)

All that being said, pretty sure it boils down to Spidey and then flavor as needed for a bare minimum Marvel collection.
 
Xavion2025 said:
The Falcon was a big deal back in the day. If you had Captain America, you wanted the Falcon. It was like having Batman without Robin.
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Thanks for the reminder that we STILL haven't gotten a classic Falcon since ML14, what, 20 years ago?
JakeEkiss said:
The only one I disagree with is Thing. Everybody else has a solo title (often more than one) and you can have them in isolation or groups and it's fine (villains don't have to have their own series, they just need to be big time enough they've menaced more than one team of superheroes)

If you have a Ben Grimm and not the other 3 you're a madman. That's like representing The Beatles with only Ringo. Best to have no FF than anything less than 4 of them. You could have an alternate 4. But you can't have just one FF member. That way lies chaos and damnation.
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Banned. There will be no Thing slander tolerated on this forum.
 
yojoebro82 said:
The bare minimum you need for a Marvel action figure collection is one each of the following:

Spider-Man
Captain America
Thor
Iron Man
Hulk
Thing (to represent the FF)
Wolverine (to represent the X-Men)
Thanos (one heavy-hitter to represent bad guys)

Bare minimum.
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It gets unwieldy very quickly. When I rebuilt my collection from scratch 15 years ago, I tried this exercise. I thought, "I love Marvel. What would a small, complete Marvel collection look like?" It becomes If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

You need Spider-Man. What's Spider-Man without Green Goblin? Green Goblin without Doc Ock? Doc Ock without the Sinister Six? Spidey without allies to help him defeat the Sinister Six? And on and on.

You need Wolverine. Wolverine needs the X-Men. Most addicts here would agree that any good X-Men collection needs Beast, Colossus, Cyclops, Gambit, Iceman, Jean, Kitty, Nightcrawler, Rogue, and Storm at a minimum. Plus Magneto for good measure.

You need Hulk. He needs Cap, Iron Man, and Thor. They need Ultron, Loki, Red Skull, and Thanos to beat up on. Honestly, I probably could've stopped there with the Avengers, but I was already dedicating a shelf to Hulk/Cap/IM/Thor, so I fleshed it out with the classic movie Avengers + BP, Doc Strange, Scarlet Witch, and Vision.

Then big characters like Doctor Doom. How can you have a Doom without a Fantastic Four?

I tried capping myself at 50 Marvel characters. I couldn't do it. I'm at 70 and I'm still missing a lot of characters folks would consider essential. I don't have Ghost Rider or almost any cosmic characters. I wound up with my essentials + some non-essential favorites (Squirrel Girl, Beta Ray Bill), which I guess is the healthiest way to do it.
Xavion2025 said:
Spider-Man
Captain America
The Falcon
Hulk
Iron Man
Thor
The Fantastic Four
Green Goblin
The Lizard
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Falcon but no X-Men? Avengers fans have gone too far.
docsilence said:
And yeah, very dude-heavy, but Marvel's never done a great job of fully establishing the "even my mom recognizes her" marquee female character, and a ton of their most iconic women are behind the X-Men label which has its own kinda siloing happening.
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It's Storm. I don't really think it's close, either. She's an icon. Everyone on Earth wants to be with Storm, but we all know she's too good for us.
 
I think Ms Marvel (Kamala) is a required member of any Marvel representation squad. She is the avatar of modern Marvel comics, and her costume is as iconic as any of other classic Marvel character. If you're trying to represent the whole of Marvel comics (and not just everything pre-2000s) she is necessary.
 
TheSameIdiot said:
It's Storm. I don't really think it's close, either. She's an icon. Everyone on Earth wants to be with Storm, but we all know she's too good for us.
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I think this is right. And it's kind of wild that it's still Storm considering that her closet competitors have all had starring roles in the MCU. Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Invisible Woman, and She-Hulk are all up there.
 
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