Crosscheck/CM-Vico/BoomBrick Wolverine Review! (Patreon)

Sheesh… three collaborators on one fig! You know I had to pick this one up and see what all the fuss was about!

A big Crosscheck/CM-Vico/BoomBrick project AND it’s a Wolverine fig?! This should be a five star review… you’d think…

Well the problems started before I even got the fig! It was completed and sent out to MrLee (a product photographer for Crosscheck) around January or 2022. So I was already irritated that it took another six months just to ship it out after the product was more-or-less completed.

Secondly, this was to be the first fig in a very ambitious four-part line up to have been released across 2021. Now here we are, almost TWO years after it’s initial tease (and more specifically a full 15 months after money was paid for the fig). So trust me when I say my mood was already a little soured before it arrived.

Not sure why Crosscheck’s team took their sweet time sending this fig out to their resellers, but here we are! He’s finally arrived! (not to mention me taking my sweet time to review the damn thing) but I digress… is it worth its $150 price tag?

Well for starters, the triple threat (lets call them XC/CMV/BB) really laid the nostalgia on thick for the packaging. The fig was shipped not only if a big dumb foam-insterted plastic shell (which is already a bit much) they then opted for this gigantic action figure esque card-backed hard plastic over the top of that! It makes it look like it could have been hanging up in a toy aisle somewhere.

The damn thing took like twenty minutes to open and get all the parts out!

…okay focus Andrew, you're getting mad and you haven’t even talked about the fig yet…

The overall design of this fig is rather interpretive of the source material. All those little orange dots and lines seem to give me the impression that Crosscheck wanted to “modernize” the blue/yellow Jim Lee look. However in minifig form, those little dots take away from the brighter yellow plastic underneath (that might technically be the flame-yellow color Lego released back in 2017… which frankly is still a bad choice to print a yellow based figure over)

So with the weird color choice for detailing, that extra design gets lost in most lighting and looks blurry a majority of the time. Though it’s subtle, it’s also not that subtle if you want more of a genuine yellow color to match the look of your other X-Men figs.

If yo take a few steps back and just stare at this fig like I did for about three hours, the whole thing is just… well it’s not very “lego” looking if you get what I mean. All of it is… well… it's a bit much. 

It’s actually kinda bad…? No wait… I like it though… I think? Well no that’s not right I don’t really “like” it… I like the idea of it… At least I did when I preordered it back in 2021 before KO Customs released their own killer Wolverine fig!

There’s just too much here to fully bite into… just look at the head designs! The weird blue eyes are odd… the freaky lookin mouths and lips are all just uncomfortable to look at. The grinning cowled head looks like a meme reaction! Also why are there so many extra heads when some of these could have just been double-sided?! Seems like a waste…

Okay okay okay hold up, let’s keep digging for something positive! So what if the packaging was wasteful and the graphic design is whack, the quality of print is good! (look I’m really trying here)

Let’s talk custom parts instead to help get my mind off things!

The cowl is ginormous! It’s longer than the fig’s torso! The fins(?) on the side of his head are more rounded than I’d like (again going back to the overall design departure). They have more of an ear like quality to them compared to a sharp 90s Wolverine cowl. It’s that bottom curve; such a rounded cut that makes them look more like big ole earlobes if you see what I’m seeing.

And of course the damn thing is super tight on minifig heads. I was keen to swap it out with KO’s recent Wolverine but nope, I’m not getting that perfect head stuck inside it! It took me a good chunk of time just to get it off the custom XC/CMV/BB head it came with! I also tried with an official Logan head and it was still really tight!

Hmmm… we’re running out of things to positively dig for…

The hair is also pretty big, and If you swap it out to any other Lego official head it looks pretty goofy and out of place! Weird how it doesn’t look bad on the fig it came with though…

Uh…

The shoulder pads are neat! As they’re directly attached to the arms. They’re great for poseability with the fig, and look pretty good too! (Hey look at that! Wow I found a little bit of positivity!)

Okay wait, it’s gone again…

The claws are really impossibly small! They feel like you could break them at any moment just looking at them! Hell, even while you’re pulling off the hands or pegging them back in place it just feels… bad.

Also they don’t technically align with the hands like in the source material. The way the claws are produced here, they are intended to reach right up the back of the hand. But due to the nature of the tiny part, if you really try and snap the hand back into the arm, you could risk it cracking along the wrist “sleeve/washer/connector”

So the final look without forcing the element into position, leaves the claws sitting either closely to the wrist where the part rests between the arm and hand or sort of crooked… unless you really forced it in there…

Aesthetically, they look great in tandem with the arm print and the shoulder pads, but I can’t see myself using them frequently in photography without a high concern for breakage.

So it comes down to the last part… the cowl hood. Ironically it’s my favorite element because it doesn’t perfectly color match with the rest of the fig, but instead works better on KO’s Wolverine! (that really says something doesn't it…)

Yep… there we go. Everything has been scrutinized and I only came out with one small piece of plastic that I liked. Bummer…

For me it comes down to that design translation. The more I look at this fig, the more I really can’t stand the head designs… like any of them… they’re all terrible. The weird expressions, the colored purple/blue eyes… yeah none of it works for me personally… that smiling grin is terrifying.

It’s ironic as well that while Crosscheck in particular has never really been one of my favorite designers, they've been known to change and update designs based on fan feedback before a final release. However that never happened with this fig.

So naturally back in 2021, it had me curious of what would come of a three way collaboration with Boom Brick and CM-Vico could be… It’s like the design team took one look at a photo of Wolverine and then said “…Yeah we got this I reckon!”

Now that I have it in hand, could there have been too many cooks in the kitchen? Who’s to say!

At the $150 price point, even if you count the cost of the big ridiculous packaging, it’s not a bad value for all the decent quality made “stuff” you get here… if only its graphic design was a little better and that stuff didn’t suck!