Jonathan Crane is the skeletal, lanky antithesis to Bruce Wayne’s armored stoicism. In the Hush arc, he wasn’t just a chemist in a sack; he was a Victorian nightmare brought into the modern age. Medicom hasn’t just “made another toy” here; they’ve translated Lee’s cross-hatching and ink-heavy shadows into an articulated masterpiece. If you’ve already invested in the “Blue and Grey” Batman, your shelf is effectively incomplete without this nightmare—but at premium import prices, we have to ask: is this a definitive masterpiece or just a well-painted hallucination? MAFEX No. 229 does not exist in a vacuum. It is the latest entry in what has become one of the most compelling dedicated villain/hero shelf-building lines in the 1:12 collector space: the MAFEX Batman: Hush collection, which has been steadily reproducing Jim Lee’s iconic designs across the full roster since the line’s inception.
Batman: Hush ran from Batman #608 through #619, cover-dated October 2002 through September 2003. Written by Jeph Loeb and drawn by Jim Lee — inked by Scott Williams, colored by Alex Sinclair — it remains one of the best-selling Batman comic story arcs of the modern era, a twelve-issue cavalcade of practically every major villain and ally in Bruce Wayne’s orbit. What makes this stand out from, say, the McFarlane Multiverse equivalent isn’t just the scale; it’s the anatomical precision. MAFEX understands that Crane is a “spidery” character. The proportions are thin without feeling fragile. It captures Lee’s vision of a man physically withered by the weight of his own pathology.
A Scarecrow figure is only as good as his accessories. And Medicom provides the essential kit for a nightmare:
- Alternate Head Sculpts: Including a “unmasked” Jonathan Crane or a more intense fear-gas-influenced look.
- Interchangeable Hands: Specifically sculpted to grip the scythe or to reach out in a predatory, claw-like fashion.
The four pairs of interchangeable hands significantly expand the posing possibilities. You get: fists, relaxed open hands, a spread-finger “grasping” or “clawing” set (highly effective for fear-spreading imagery), and what appears to be a grip pair suited for holding accessories. The clawing hands in particular are the standout choice for menacing display, capturing that slightly inhuman quality of Crane’s hand gestures in the source material. Swapping hands on MAFEX figures requires care — the wrist connection is snug — but this is not out of the ordinary for the line.
The included figure stand is Medicom’s standard clear articulated support — functional, unobtrusive, useful for dynamic or off-balance poses. It does what it needs to do and disappears visually. The omission of a “Fear Gas” cloud effect is a slight bummer for the purists, but the inclusion of the scythe—a weapon Crane wields with surprising lethality in the Hush arc—is the real draw.
Head One:
This is Crane in full Hush regalia: burlap cinched tight and eyes rendered as dark, abyssal voids. By omitting visible pupils, Medicom honors Jim Lee’s signature design language—a cold, unreadable malevolence that is far more unnerving than a standard snarl.
Head Two:
The clear standout. This variant reveals a screaming jaw through a jagged tear in the burlap, juxtaposing static stitching against raw, human fury.
Head Three:
The straw hair is rendered in natural straw yellows and off-whites, with individual strands differentiated by the sculpt and made distinct by the paint. The hat is appropriately dark and weathered.
Here is the honest conversation that needs to happen, at premium price point, the accessory loadout for MAFEX No. 229 is slim. Three head sculpts, four pairs of hands, and a posable figure stand. That is it. There is no fear gas canister. There is no cloud of toxin effect part, no removable hat, no scythe or sickle or any of the other handheld implements that have been associated with the character across his various incarnations. To be clear, this is not a deal-breaker. The figure’s sculpt and interchangeable parts — the three heads and four hand pairs — do significant lifting in making this figure feel complete despite the sparse prop situation.
The burlap mask is handled with particular care. The beige-tan base tone of the sacking is supplemented by subtle dirtying effects and darker paint work along the stitching lines, giving the mask a quality of material authenticity that plain flat paint could not achieve. The stitches are individually defined in darker tones, and where the burlap sits over the underlying head sculpt’s contours, the paint work reinforces the sense of fabric pulled taut. For a plastic reproduction of a burlap sack mask, this is as good as it gets at this scale. Medicom has successfully replicated the way Jim Lee uses heavy shadows. The deep-set eye sockets of the mask are painted with an abyssal black that absorbs light, ensuring that Scarecrow looks menacing regardless of your shelf’s lighting setup.
The figure features Medicom’s standard articulation scheme for the line: double-jointed elbows and knees, a butterfly shoulder joint system, a double ball-jointed neck, ab crunch, waist rotation, and the full complement of ankle, wrist, and hip articulations that make the difference between a figure that can only stand upright and one that can be posed convincingly across the full spectrum of Scarecrow’s physical vocabulary. Jonathan Crane is not Batman. He is not a martial arts combatant who needs a figure capable of achieving high kicks and flying punch poses — he is a lean, slightly unhinged academic in a coat who relies on fear gas, psychological manipulation, and an occasional scythe. The butterfly shoulders in particular allow for that wide-arm display pose — the classic Scarecrow posture — without breaking the coat’s silhouette dramatically, and the neck articulation allows for the subtle head tilt that transforms the figure from a standing man in a costume to something distinctly more unsettling.
The coat does restrict the hip and lower-body articulation somewhat, as it inevitably must — soft goods would solve this, but the trade-off of sculpted coat for aesthetic accuracy in a static display context is one most collectors will accept without complaint. You are not going to be doing dynamic action poses with the lower half of this figure, and frankly you should not need to.
The packaging maintains the uniform, “bookcase-friendly” aesthetic of the line. The deep blues and iconic Jim Lee character art on the side panels make these figures look incredible when lined up like a curated library of rogues. For the “Mint in Box” (MIB) purists, the window display is generous. You can see every accessory—the scythe, the alternate heads, the extra hands—without a single stray twist-tie obscuring the view. The plastic clamshell is designed to easily pop Crane out for a photoshoot and slide him back in for storage without damaging the integrity of the box.
This is objectively one of the finest 1:12 scale interpretations of the character currently available, alongside Mondo’s well-regarded BTAS version. If you are a casual or entry-level collector, the price-to-accessory ratio requires honest consideration. While the price is steep, the fidelity to the source material and the sophisticated engineering make it hard to match at this scale. It is a cynical, beautifully executed love letter to the Hush comics—a reminder that in the world of premium collectibles, the only thing more frightening than the Master of Fear is a gaping hole in your display case.
