Star Wars: The Black Series Dengar

 One of the bounty hunters that stands around as Vader talks about not disintegrating the crew of the Millennium Falcon, Dengar is one of those figures that wound up in my collection somehow, and now, on the eve of the release of the first wave of Archive figures, containing Boba Fett, Bossk, and IG-88, ended up being totally necessary to have, as the Empire bounty hunter team is about to be complete. Or, is complete, if you’d been buying them since the beginning.

This is going to be a hard article to write, because while I like Dengar as a figure quite a bit, there is not very much to say about him. He’s one of those characters that has no actual character in the main Star Wars narrative, but does have some EU tales and appearances in ancillary works. But Black Series Dengar is another proof of that time tested Star Wars adage that, if a character appears on screen, eventually it will surface in figure form. The Black Series again has been doing this building towards thing, where a Boba Fett is released, and then an IG-88, and you wonder why they’d pick IG-88, and then when Bossk is released you say, “oh, they’re releasing the Empire bounty hunters” and everything makes sense.

Anyway, Dengar is wearing what looks a lot like Imperial Stormtrooper armor, a hodge podge of parts and coverings, which lends to this overall look he has as being a scavenger or looter, picking up parts he finds and needs as he finds and needs them. The figure really only has two colors, the drab olive of the armor and the white of the garment underneath it, and honestly is not very much to look at. Dengar falls into the second tier of Empire bounty hunters: Boba Fett, IG-88, and Bossk are cool looking. One is a lizard man, one a robot, and the last is Boba Fett. But the others, Dengar, 4LOM, and Zuckus, are kind of just there, being kind of a bug, a robot with a bug head, and a man. While they can’t all be zingers, and sometimes your costume department has to whip up a Dengar, I’ve seen pictures thanks to a friend of the entire bounty hunter cast assembled, and they all look great, Dengar included. I’ll post a similar picture when Archive Wave 1 arrives and I complete my team.

The normal Black Series joints and posing, with the arms being slightly restricted due to the armor parts, and the ankles on mine at least being a little stiff and difficult to manipulate. We’ll get in to this issue more later with a figure it actually hamstrings, but this seems like a troubling trend among Black Series figures, this overly tight joint that doesn’t move and compromises the figure. The general bulkiness of the character precludes the need for real dynamic posing, but Dengar does strike tough, intimidating poses real well.

Dengar does have a few accessories, which does make him seemingly better than a figure like 4LOM. Included are a backpack and two blasters: one the standard long Imperial blaster and a smaller blaster pistol, which fits in a holster on the waist. The backpack has a pair of straps that can be – or at least are intended to be – attached to the sides of Dengar, but the connection is flimsy at very best owing to the pegs being very, very small and generally unable to be secured. There is a C-loop in one of them that can be used to hold the long Imperial blaster, as though it were tied to the backpack, but the security of this is weak at best. It doesn’t lose much if the figure is just standing there with the long weapon attached, but if you try to have this arrangement and then pose him, it does not work out as well. But the variety of blasters does translate to a variety of looks for the figure, which is always cool.

The one thing that is totally interesting about Dengar here is that his face and his headwrap appear to be two separate pieces, not a singular one. I was unable to get a useable picture of this, but it looks like Dengar had a sculpted head that was then put inside the wrapping, and it is not one single piece, with a face carved out of it. The headwrap does not move and is not removable, so the reason for this is unclear, but you can clearly see a tiny gap between face and headwear and, for some reason, when I saw that I became fixated.

Months ago, Dengar was announced and I was totally ambivalent. Then, I reached that stage where I wanted to start filling in the spots of my Black Series collection that I passed on before, and grew determined to not miss things going forward. A friend snagged me a 4LOM over the summer and that essentially meant I was going to be in for the remaining bounty hunters, and the Archive reveals meant I wasn’t going to have to put in any real effort to attain them. Just like with 4LOM, Dengar is going to show his real value when the Archive figures arrive, and the team picture is complete. But he’s a good figure, despite just being Dengar.