In the early 1990s, the X-Men were everywhere. Even before the iconic animated series hit the air in October of 1992, the August 1991 first issue of X-Men broke records to become the single best-selling comic book issue of all time (8.1 million copies, if you’re curious). The arcade game was one of the most popular and ubiquitous of the era. Pizza Hut was running X-Men promotions. And toy aisles were absolutely overflowing with Toy Biz’s expansive X-Men action figure line, featuring all of the heroes and villains of the comics, cartoons, and video games.
Sales for the line, launched in 1991, were robust. It was a self-perpetuating mutant feeding frenzy, where the comics, animated series, and action figures each bolstered the popularity of the others. Even padding out waves with endless variants of strong sellers like Wolverine and Cable, Toy Biz was in danger of exhausting the stream of viable characters for the line. As it continued, spinning off into sub-lines like X-Force in 1994, Toy Biz ventured deeper and deeper into the pages of X-Men and its ancillary titles, pulling weirder and weirder names to supplement its waves of figures. With thirty years of hindsight, this means that more than a few names that made it to store shelves would stump even the most ardent Marvel Comics fan.
The X-Force line is home to many of the most obscure and odd character selections in the annals of Toy Biz’s X-Men. X-Force, as a comic, only debuted in 1991, putting the toys on the proverbial “bleeding edge” of trying to predict fan favorites and important characters. It was almost impossible to tell who or what was going to have long-term impact, given that the concept and many of the characters were only a year or two old. For Toy Biz, this meant that villains, especially, were chosen more or less at random from reference materials provided by Marvel. Featuring such other luminaries as Slayback and Comcast, you could write an entire list just around X-Force villains. But that feels like cheating.
The reason Krule has the honor of representing the line for this list is because he represents the kind of continuity-altering, multi-issue storylines that the 1990s helped fill the dustbin of comics history with. Krule was one of the “X-Ternals,” a group of mutants who claimed to also possess immortality. Krule and the X-Ternals battled X-Force in five of the title’s first twenty-four issues. By the time Krule’s action figure hit shelves, the X-Ternals had already vanished from the comics, returning in 1996 to be killed off by Selene, Black Queen of the Hellfire Club – incidentally disproving the whole “immortality” thing.
Tusk was one of the “Riders of the Apocalypse,” a team of Inhumans recruited by the villain Apocalypse as henchmen, introduced in the pages of X-Factor. A couple of his teammates made their appearance later in the line, but this isn’t why Tusk is interesting: he was produced in the fourth wave of Toy Biz X-Men figures, meaning he was included in the line before characters like Jean Grey or Psylocke.
Why Tusk was chosen for this honor is unknown, it’s thought that maybe his mutant ability to create “mini-me’s” (one of which is included with the figure) was considered especially “toyetic,” leading to his inclusion. He also makes a brief appearance in two episodes of X-Men: The Animated Series, once in the fourth and once again in the fifth and final season of the show. An interesting footnote is that the fourth wave of Toy Biz X-Men is the single best-selling wave of the line, meaning that there were likely scores of young X-Men fans playing with a figure of this character they had not encountered and would never encounter in the comics.
Talk about characters who made it into the line prematurely, Kylun was a tertiary member of Excalibur, itself a fairly obscure team. Kylun was a mutant child accidentally teleported to an alternate dimension where he was raised as a warrior, returning to Earth-616 in pursuit of the extradimensional sorcerer Necrom. There, Kylun joined forces with Excalibur to defeat Necrom, staying with the team for a time before departing to find his long-lost parents. Please note his absence from the above group shot.
What makes Kylun’s inclusion in the line odd was that he was singled out over all of his Excalibur teammates, save for Nightcrawler. Three of these characters are female (Shadowcat, Rachel Grey, and Meggan), making Kylun an even more uncomfortably egregious example of Toy Biz’s gender biases than Tusk.
By number of appearances, Quark is arguably the most obscure “good guy” character Toy Biz produced: while the line is cluttered with villains like Krule and Tusk, the heroes Toy Biz produced tended to be at least somewhat established within the Marvel Universe. Not so for Quark. He was an ally of Longshot, a denizen of the dimension known as the Mojoverse. There, Quark aided Longshot in his battle against the tyranny of mad multimedia megalomaniac Mojo, obsessed with creating violent reality television programs with his captive subjects.
Quark resurfaced during another of those title and continuity-spanning crossover storylines, this one seeing the X-Men and X-Force trapped in Mojoworld with Longshot. Here, Quark is an adversary to Longshot, turned into a mindless thrall of Mojo by mental reconditioning. Quark snaps out of it, giving the confused and slightly-disappointed child who was gifted this action figure options for playtime. These options also included letting Quark sift to the bottom of the toybox and playing with Gambit or Beast instead.
These two usually top lists like this, and rightly so: Spat and Grovel were functionally created as a dare. At the time they were made (in 1998, as the Toy Biz line was winding down), they had made a single comics appearance, in 1997’s Uncanny X-Men #346. Creator Scott Lobdell allegedly designed both characters “specifically to be too weird to make for a good transition to toy form.”
Both are mercenaries trying to capture Gambit, both have pre-existing history with the Cajun that are never expounded on. Spat is a woman aging in reverse Benjamin Button-style, Grovel is a hulking lizard creature who would require entirely new tooling at a time when Toy Biz was growing increasingly cost-conscious. Both found their way to action figure form anyway. Even with Hasbro’s Marvel Legends line paying continued tribute to Toy Biz, neither of these feel likely to make their return to action figure form any time soon.
Lasting for almost a decade and containing hundreds of characters, Toy Biz’s Marvel Universe is still one of the collected and respected super-hero toylines of all time. And though sometimes worth making fun of, it was Toy Biz’s dedication to deep-cut characters and building out rosters that made the line a collector favorite, then and now — even if it is ridiculous that they made Kylun before Kitty Pryde.
Who’s your favorite deep-cut character in Toy Biz’s X-Men line? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
