Every hero needs a good villain - and let's be honest, Wonder Woman's a bit short-staffed in that department. Sure she's got a ready supply of foes at call, but none that really step up to match the Jokers and Lex Luthors of the supervillainy world. For his reintroduction of Wonder Woman, Allan Heinberg chose Circe to lead the (sizeable) pack of villains - like most everything else in the story arc he half-assed it, but she's nonetheless the top dog, evil-wise, and so earned an action figure in the Wonder Woman series. Circe, as most of you probably know, isn't a recent invention - she appears in the Odyssey, using her beauty and knowledge of potions to entrance Odysseus's crew and transform them into pigs. Not a great start, but once Ody got the jump on her she calmed down a bit, and in fact ended up helping him find his way home, so she's not all bad (Heinberg managed to convey this too, in fact - bitter she may be, but she believes she's doing the right thing in the end). Her Wonder Woman incarnation is a mix of classical and modern - she's the same barnyard-animal-making sorceress of old, but she hasn't sat still in the intervening years, with old-style costume elements like her cloak and armour and the flowers on her belt offset by the modern stylings of her black bodysuit. Her face is nice work - attractive but cold, so you wouldn't want to be around her regardless of how good she looks: she's a dangerous woman. The paint lets her down a bit. Her bodysuit is all black, but with a mix of matt and gloss finishes giving it some definition. Her chest armour (well, scalemail bra, basically) is a dark silver, but without any painted definition to the spaces between the scales - an ink wash would have gone well there. Additionally her greaves are sculpted (and shown in the comics) to be the same kind of armour, but they're left unpainted, just black - she's also got a couple of scrolls tucked into her belt that no-one bothered painting. Her cloak is a solid purple, and has good coverage over its surfaces where it's painted rather than cast in coloud, but the edges around her shoulders are a bit haphazard. Her hair is decent but unremarkable, and really needed a darker base to make the highlight stand out, and add definition. The bunch of flowers, meanwhile, is awful, and looks like a cross between a pizza and someone having thrown up on her. That's not a great write-up, but I'll tell you what, I really like this figure. The reason why is that she's sculpted in a very dramatic pose, with her weight resting on her right leg, her cloak billowing out to the left, her hand pointing, her hair whipping around like she's standing on a clifftop in a raging gale - it makes her look powerful and sorcerous, and really does make up for the shortcomings in other areas. Most action figures (especially the relatively un-articulated DC Direct ones) end up just standing there on the shelf, looking like they're waiting for something to happen - Circe looks like she's making something happen. Speaking of articulation, she has the standard set - ball joint neck (limited by the hair, but since it's being blown to one side, only on that side), ball joint shoulders, peg elbows, swivel wrists, peg hips and knees. There's not a great deal of versatility to her, but the visual drama of her sculpted elements means that she looks quite good, and quite striking, in several poses with only minor changes to her actual body position. Her only accessory, besides the base (which, with the heavy cloak, she needs to stand) is a sickle, which can be held in her pointing hand - it looks natural, whether you have the hand down, or pointing over her grip on the weapon - or tucked into one of her belts. I was ready to largely ignore this figure - the character hadn't done much interesting in the comic storyline, and the figure wasn't that special-looking in the publicity photos. The confidence of her pose saves her - for that, I actually rate her only behind Wonder Woman herself in this wave of action figures. For all her flaws, she looks good on the shelf.