DC Announces Luchador Action Figures and a Death Pin-Up

Action figure collectors will have some new and bizarre toys to decorate their shelves with thanks to DC. They’ve dipped their toes into the wild world of Mexican wrestling with their new Lucha Explosiva line.

The line features six heroes and villains, appropriately here referred to as technicos and rudos. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman will be paired off with Metallo II, Deathstroke and Cheetah, each figure redone in an over-the-top classic wrestling action figure style. They stand 7-inches tall, and are available for preorder at $39.99 each with an expected ship dated on August 30, 2019.

In addition to the visual re-imagining of our favorite characters as ring warriors, each one will come with a new backstory. Wonder Woman is no longer a daughter of Themyscira, but instead hails from the island of La Zona del Silencio off the Yucatan coast. Her mantle of Wonder Woman is her mask instead of her traditional costume. More whimsical is Metallo, a lucha-obsessed robot housing the brain of a former wrestler built by university students in order to compete.

There’s no word whether these incarnations will see appearances in the DC comics, though it would certainly be a lot of fun. Lucha libre has certainly danced between superheroics and wrestling. Lucha Undergound couples its matches with a great deal of superhuman storytelling, and legendary figures like El Santo and Blue Demon were both wrestlers and stars of sci-fi and horror adventure films.

The luchadors aren’t the only big announcement on the DC figure front. DC Bombshells recently unveiled a statue of Neil Gaiman’s Death at Toy Fair 2019. The Bombshells line portrays DC heroines as 1940s pin-ups based on the art of Ant Lucia. Previous figures have included Raven, Katana and Cheetah.

Death was introduced by Neil Gaiman in the acclaimed Sandman series of comics, and has gone on to star in several critically-acclaimed spinoffs as well as occasional appearances in the regular DC universe such as when she met Lex Luthor in Action Comics #894. She was based on a friend of Gaiman’s, Cinnamon Hadley, who passed away from cancer last year.

The new Death statue is phenomenal. She is posed in a classic nurse’s uniform. That may seem odd for the personification of life’s end, but Gaiman stated that Death is also present at every living thing’s birth so it does make a kind of sense. She has her sigil, an ankh, around her neck and carries the black umbrella she is pictured with instead of a scythe.

There is no release date on the statue yet. Previous statues in the line retailed for around $130.

Hopefully Death’s appearance in a high profile line like DC Bombshells indicates that she’ll be making more appearances in the DC Universe. A new line of comics centered around Gaiman’s characters, The Sandman Universe, launched in 2018 and ties in with the recent Dark Nights: Metal series.