A to Z Challenge: Azrael

Last year I did Marvel Legends figures, which are 6" figures based on Marvel characters from comics, movies, and TV shows.  So naturally the sequel to this should be DC figures.

Predictably DC doesn't have quite the smooth history of Marvel figures.  They've had a few starts and stops and called the line different things.  A couple of years ago they switched from Mattel to McFarlane, ironically owned by the guy who made his mint first with Marvel by drawing Spider-Man and then Image Comics by creating Spawn.  The Mattel figures were usually about 6" like the Marvel ones made by Hasbro, but the McFarlane ones are about 7".

Anyway, I've mentioned before that the Knightfall/Knightsquest/Knightsend story in Batman comics in the early-to-mid 90s was one of my favorites and I especially loved Azrael.  The character was created by Dennis O'Neil and drawn by future Marvel big shot Joel Quesada in a 4-issue miniseries called The Sword of Azrael.

Azrael is an assassin from the Order of St. Dumas, a renegade "saint" that sort of like the Knights Templar has a bunch of money and stuff.  The identity of Azrael is passed from generation-to-generation.  Jean-Paul Valley was the latest incarnation when his father dies and leaves him the armor.

This is what the original Azrael suit looks like.  I got this figure off eBay years ago and it's kind of weird in that you can't really move the head so he's always looking at his feet:

In Knightfall, Bruce Wayne is crippled and Azrael takes over as Batman.  This first Legends of Batman figure I got in the 90s along with Viking Batman.  It represents the costume Jean-Paul creates to fight Bane in issue #500.  This pic is off eBay.  What's more retro:  the figure or the $5.99 KMart price tag?:

In 2013 I saw on Amazon they were coming out with a new, larger figure of AzBats.  This represents the next stage of the suit's evolution in the Knightsquest/Knightsend comics.  It has Batarang launchers, flame throwers(!), and an armored look.  It's just fucking cool, but it's really top-heavy so it can be a bitch to stand.

In 2020 or so author/artist Sean Murphy wrote a series called Curse of the White Knight and incorporated Azrael into the plot.  I bought the figure based on that:

It mostly looks like the original, but with a few ornamental changes.  The figure has kind of skinny legs but otherwise is pretty awesome.  The head is much better than the old one.

In sort of Hasbro fashion, they made a variant of that figure that's supposed to look more like the Michael Lane "Suit of Sorrows" version in the late 2000s:

There's also an AzBats version I got from Mercari for pretty cheap:

And then they made this silver variant...to make more money, I guess.

I just about wet myself when my brother told me McFarlane was coming out with a big version of that Legends of Batman version.  I was instantly like Wayne in the first Wayne's World when he plays a guitar and says, "Oh yes, it will be mine."  (And then says the same thing about Tia Carrere.)  The blue might be a little too light but otherwise it does look pretty sweet. 

There was kind of a hassle to buy mine.  The figure was supposed to be exclusive to Walmart.  Problem:  Walmart didn't list it on its website!  Except there was one weird page that I found by taking a link from someone's page but I couldn't find it when I searched.  It wouldn't let you buy or preorder the figure and McFarlane's site helpfully said, "Coming Soon."  Meanwhile, dozens of these were turning up on eBay and Mercari.  WTF?  How were people getting these on the secondary market when I couldn't even find it on the primary market yet?  It was very fishy.

Fishier when I finally saw one on Mercari for a reasonable price (only like 2/3 over retail with shipping and tax versus 2-3 times over retail a lot of them were going for) and the figure came in the factory packaging.  So my paranoid thinking is that either people were buying or stealing them from Walmart warehouses or McFarlane warehouses or whatever intermediaries they use.  Because if you just bought this off a shelf, it wouldn't come in the brown box it was packed in when it shipped from the factory.  Or to be less paranoid, some Walmarts might have put them up on a shelf still in the brown boxes and people were climbing up to snag them.  (When I went to my local Walmart I did make sure to check up top as best I could in case there were any hidden away.)  These are the kind of annoying distribution problems toys have, especially since Bain Capital put the toy store industry out of business. 

Just for the hell of it, back in like 2013 I got this weird AzBats figure off eBay in a set with a regular Superman, regular Batman, and Superman Red from when he was briefly an energy being.  I swear they used a Black Panther head for the figure and the armor was black-and-gold, not blue or red like AzBats in the comics.  I had some red paint lying around from my Scarlet Knight figure, so I repainted him red, sort of like the final version of AzBats in the comics:

That recolored version of the blue one above was in a two-pack with a regular Bruce Wayne Batman.  I never bought it because I already had the blue one, so it seemed pointless.  And now of course it's really expensive.

Anyway, I have a ton of Azrael stuff.  I should get a Michael Lane version, but I don't think there's been one for a while so it'd probably be expensive.

And it shouldn't be surprising that Azrael was an influence on the Scarlet Knight.  The basic color scheme, the glowing sword, and the identity being handed down from one generation to another (albeit not via familial relations) all became part of the Scarlet Knight mythos.  So even if a lot of people just think of  him as a relic of one Batman story 30 years ago, he's had a lot of influence on me at least.

There you go, so challenging!