Blade, Red Skull at Hasbro.com

The Abomination 2-pack for the Hulk movie wave 1 is available for pre-order now at Hasbro Toy Shop and today they've added the new Blade, Sentry, Red Skull and Electro 2-packs.

Those last 4 aren't up for pre-order yet, but they've got entries which is usually a good sign that pre-orders are coming.

Sentry, Electro, Blade and Red Skull photos

Over on The Fwoosh Forums there's a scan of a catalog shot of the new figures. I won't link directly to the picture (since that's a little tasteless for total strangers to burn through the guy's photobucket bandwidth limits) but it's available for viewing in the Super Hero Squad forum.

Most important news: The ad says they start shipping in July. Now, the poster didn't say what company the ad was from, as companies like Entertainment Earth and Hasbro's catalog tend to ship after the figures are already available in stores, so they might hit earlier, but for now, it looks like the totally unsourced and absolutely made-up release date of June that some people are saying is wrong. Now, maybe this catalog is right and it will be July, or maybe the catalog is wrong and they'll hit stores a month before shipping from whereever this catalog is from, but at least it's slightly more reliable than a date picked out of thin air simply because it's somewhat near the pre-order dates for other waves on some other sites (because using that logic, Hasbro's Marvel Legends wave 4 should be hitting any day now.) Well, that's it for the soap-box.

The picture shows that Captain America is going to be in full shield-slinging glory (to go with our holding-the-shield and shield-on-his-back Caps), Punisher is in a trenchcoat with some non-street legal guns blaring from both arms (which solves the complaint people have about Mr. Rocket Launching Punisher from the early waves), Red Skull is in the classic green jumpsuit with a Cosmic Cube.

Blade looks very Wesley Snipes-ish, but that's fine since that's the look most people recognize (although there would be a certain nostalgia factor in a 1970's era Blade), and comes armed with a gun and a sword. Between reality warping cubes, Cap's shield, and the guns-a-blazin Blade and Punishers, this is definitely a more action oriented set of sculpts than we've seen before.

Electro is classic yellow-star-on-his-face, and not Sensational/Animated style or the post-modern mask-off, lightning everywhere style that artists sometimes try to pass off (yeah it's more realistic, but it's not more recognizable.) Fans of the Sinister Six rejoice.

Sentry is the last new sculpt shown, and it's a little... well... I'll hold off until we see more than just a low-res scan of an order form. He looks to be in mid-flight pose, and he's shown as bulkier than Spidey (which he probably should be) but I suppose it is hard to capture the character's powers in SHS format.

The two Spider-Man figures in the line look like re-sculpts, but as I discussed in this previous post promo shots aren't always the end result, and they could just be a place-holders.

If they're NOT place-holders, then one of the Spideys looks to be the white-web shooting Spidey from the Easter single packs (good news for everyone that lives away from a Target, bad news for everyone that picked up the rather over-priced Easter impulse set.)

The other Spidey is a black-webbed (aka "comic" version for those that care) version of the left-hand-shooting, right hand grabbing figure, but it's hard to tell if that hand is open (ie, ready to hold the webbing in the Bank Heist playset) or closed (punching) so we'll have to wait for a clearer picture.

While many people complain about the abundance of Spider-Men, at least we were still getting new sculpts, and even new Spider-Characters (Ben Reilly, the Iron Spidey costume now used by the Scarlet Spiders over in the Initiative) so hopefully this isn't a sign of future trends.

I know Hasbro's sculptors must be running low on ways of making Spidey look unlike the other 20 figures we already have, but just as a bit of pontificating here: Casual collectors will tolerate re-sculpts, and variant collectors will tolerate re-paints, but when it comes to straight up re-issues, you run the risk of alienating those markets.

Edit: a few posts down in the thread, someone says that the picture was from Previews, so there you go, a source for the picture.

Sentry, Electro, Red Skull and Blade at Entertainment Earth

Entertainment Earth has recently put up Wave 9 (although "wave" depends on how you see it since some retailers have started lumping 5 and 6 into 5, thus shortening all of the other waves by a number) of the Super Hero Squad for pre-order. It's not really news, since BoyWithAGun already published the skus on a couple web-sites, but Entertainment Earth is listing the wave as:

Spider-Man & Electro
Spider-Man & Sentry
Captain America & Red Skull
Blade & Punisher

Now, when the SKUs were released, we were given almost full names for the release, thus no "wait... is 'Marvel' supposed to be Marvel Girl? Rachel? Jean? Marvel Boy? Captain Marvel?" or "H? Is that Hulk? Hood? Oh... Hand Ninja... that makes sense." so as I said, it's not really breaking news, nor is it confirmation since online retailers can cancel pre-orders if Hasbro changes the wave up, but I thought a few of you may be interested.

Of note: this wave follows the 4 new, 4 re-do trend that's been going on recently.

It will also be the third wave in a row to feature 2 Spider-Men packs (although wave 8 features the Ben Reilly Spider-Man, so whether you want to call that an exception who knows). Skus for the next two waves feature packs with names like SPD, S-M and S-Man, which, if they turn out to be Spider-Man means we will have 5 waves in a row with 2 Spider-Men per wave for an additional 10 Spider-Men this year.

And finally, it's also a great little tip of the hat to the message board posts saying "Hasbro will never make a Red Skull because they're afraid of kids playing with Nazis!"