I love action figures. I love them so much that I have bought, sold, and traded thousands of them since I was six years old. I love talking about action figures and comic books and movies and cartoons. I love being a nerd, a geek, and a dork. I love monsters and robots, cowboys and aliens, secret agents and gangsters, Orkos and Snarfs. I love Mexican super-hero bootlegs and Japanese Transformer knock-offs. I love the villain over hero—the bad guys always had cooler stuff (see Weather Dominator). I love the smell of glue that wafts over your face when you separate bubble from blister card. I love annoying twisty ties and hard to open clamshells for collectors with sticky fingers. I love the feeling that you get when you find that short-packed figure or grail piece. I love saying “three and three-quarter inch” and “five point articulation” out loud. I love that Mezco made it possible to have a greased-up deaf guy in a cage on my desk at work. I love that a talking Towelie figure from South Park that says, “How spicy do you like your Chang Sauce?” exists. I love when friends give me weird toy gifts. I love giving people weird toy gifts. I love yard sales, flea markets, and thrift stores. I love small town comic shops, book stores, and record stores. And I love eBay and I really, really hate eBay.
The things you own end up owning you. – Tyler Durden
When a person accumulates related items like stamps, guns, bottle caps, shoes or wine, that collection of correlated artifacts is a small reflection on who they are as a person—their tastes and their interests, where they may spend their time, and how much money they make. Those items create an emotional response each time the owner reflects about it and eventually the items begin to slowly own the owner. If you want to hold that super sweet _______ in your hands and get that little jolt of happiness, you are physically and metaphysically bound to that object. It owns you.
Have you ever known someone who collects guns? Don’t things about the person seem to make more sense when you find out they have 6 shotguns and 10 handguns displayed in a glass case next to their bed? How about someone who collects wine? Different breed of horse, right?
Personally I’m a 35 year old narcissistic man-child with a Peter Pan complex and a severe plastic addiction.
Vintage t-shirt collection? Check. Wore Adidas on my wedding day? Check. Action figures over the fireplace? Check. Source for all relevant knowledge about comic books in the known universe according to my nephew? Check. Your addiction may not be crazy as mine and your complexes may not run as deep, but we all have big time feels for our stuff. George Carlin said it best: “Your stuff is STUFF, other people’s stuff is shit.” And I think anyone who’s opened a 1982 Lafite Rothschild, a new pack of baseball cards, or Hot Toys action figure knows EXACTLY what I’m talking about.
Once I started outlining the different items and themes I wanted to touch on in this column, I got really excited that it could be an open forum for me to talk about something I’ve loved since I was a kid. I’ll do some reviews, but I’m going to try to stay out of the mainstream and give some of the smaller companies face time. I’ll talk news, rumors, gossip, and things that perturb me—but this is not a one-way street. I want to tell the rich stories about this hobby and I know I’m not the only one that has them. I want to hear from you guys too. I may even say some things you guys don’t like or agree with and that’s what it’s about—the discourse.
I’ll start with some background about yours truly so you can see where my collecting habits were nurtured. I want to tell you about some of those killer “Uh huh!” moments we’ve all had as collectors. I want to explain to you why I’m so passionate about small plastic men with guns.
I was born in 1979 in Pittsburgh, PA. My parents were both hard working people and my sister and I were always lavished with love from family and friends. My earliest toy memories are about He-Man—the toys, the cartoon, the coloring books, the Underoos, the socks, the lunch box, the toothbrush, the inflatable chair—I had it all. One birthday every guest brought me a different character as a gift and I dressed as him for Halloween later that year. I think I burned through at least 4 He-Man’s alone in my childhood, that’s how hard I played He-Man. My dad would come home from work, raise his briefcase over his head, and shout “By the power of NUMBSKULLS!” and I used to get sooo pissed off. Then in 1986 my family moved from one side of Pittsburgh to the other and just like that He-Man was for babies. My new neighborhood’s currency was in G.I. Joe figures. Everybody traded them—even the girls. The toys were flying off the shelf and the television series was in its prime, just like Masters of the Universe a few years before. But this toy wasn’t just a guy in his underwear throwing giant locusts around—this was anti-terrorism. This was a fight for ol’ glory! This was thwarting world domination by a ruthless terrorist organization named COBRA! This was a war for Amurica! Again—I was totally sucked into the propaganda. Suddenly my wardrobe is injected with olive drab and toy guns that made the loudest RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT were the best things ever. As a kid, my hands-down all-time favorite G.I. Joe figure was Destro. I remember buying him and Duke at the same time. He had the craziest backstory and how could a kid use resist the chrome dome? The G.I. Joe: Real American Hero line became my first toy collection. I would trade up newer figures for the older ones and barter anything else I had to get them. My Uncle Ray (who only had a daughter) would get me the sickest, biggest machine every Christmas and birthday. Another year later, no one cared about their Joes—all anyone cared about were these guys Mario and Luigi.
See my age group is very odd—smack dab on the cusp of Generation X and Generation Y. We were a little too young for the grunge movement and Reality Bites and we were too old for Pokemon and Backstreet Boys. It’s a weird place to be because when you think about the early 1980’s, those first few years were still very much stuck in the late 1970’s. There wasn’t a landmark change in family life happening like “The Greatest Generation” nesting in suburbia in the 1950’s or like the cultural movement by young people during the mid-60’s. Everyone was just trying to get over disco and get gas for their giant cars. There were some advances though—Atari, cable, VCRs. We used to hear from our parents that they only had 3 TV channels—I easily remember when our cable box stopped at 79 and there was only one HBO! But being an 80’s kid was a great time to be into action figures. And not just action figures, but also each and every half-hour cartoon that showed the battles that these characters engaged in and how these characters interacted with each other. It was a cavalcade of transforming robots, faceless serpent-based villains, feline-themed barbarians, and ninjas—oh the ninjas. Double-down with some Mr. T cereal and a Slimer Hi-C on a Saturday morning and the whole bundle of 1980’s children entertainment was a multi-sensory hadouken to our young, developing minds. It was called the decade of decadence and we didn’t even have internet.
When I was old enough to go to the comic shop without adult supervision, a group of talented artists starting doing some great work at Marvel Comics. Then suddenly this group decided to go rogue and create their own comic company so they could push the boundaries of the medium. In Image comics, the girls were sexier, the violence unreal, the guns blazing, and (for some reason still unknown to me) the shoulder pads extra-large. X-Men and Spider-man turned into Spawn and Sin City. But after buying my fifth special edition variant chromium cover, I realized that buying and (ultimately keeping) comics was boring, but the figures the comic shops sold were much cooler, more fun to display, and priced pretty much the same. Small start-up companies began selling their figures through comic shops directly, so you could get a more adult designed figure from your favorite comic book. Anime and other Japanese figures began to penetrate the market here in the states. I was also a big fan of Kenner’s Batman Animated line and the Toy Biz X-Men line, which both had fantastic cartoons airing on television at the time. Then I purchased Tomart’s Price Guide to Action Figure Collectibles and it affirmed to me that the toys that I liked to play with as kid were perfectly fine to collect as an adult. The book featured all the action figure lines of my youth and then some. It was all the toys that I didn’t get a chance to play with because everyone was buying me He-Men, but now I could own them as a collector. It was published, written, hardbound proof that I could play with toys forever.
At that point, I was a new buyer in an up trending market. I had a good paying job working at Chuck E. Cheese (that’s a whole ‘nother column), so put myself on a fixed income. Toy Biz had my X-Men dollars, Kenner had my Batman dollars and McFarlane Toys had my Spawn dollars. I still bought old G.I. Joes, but now I bought them by the tubful and I began selling at conventions and shows. A kid in my neighborhood had a dad who worked for Sears in the early 80’s and him and his older brother pretty had everything—including the USS Flagg. Their parents wanted to make their old playroom into a gym, so bye-bye kid toys. It took me two trips to move six appliance boxes filled with missiles, guns, planes, jeeps, Legos, and a few random checkers back to my parent’s house. I dumped it all into a mountain in the middle of my bedroom and began going through everything piece by piece and over a series of three conventions I had sold most of it off.
By college I was buying less versions of Spawn and more versions of beer because I was a poor college student looking for a party. I did eat a lot of ramen so I could afford nearly every figure in the Simpsons: World of Springfield line. What was changing in the market was the availability and access to action figures. Suddenly toy collecting was nerd chic and stores like Suncoast, Media Play, and Electronics Boutique all had added expansive toy sections. Stores began selling exclusive items that were only available in particular locations. eBay also became as place to purchase new and old toys. I signed up early on and the first auction I ever won was for a lot of Thundercats. I paid for them with a money order and the guy never sent them. I got screwed over on my first auction. Snarf snarf.
It took a trip to visit my toy collecting college roommate in Tokyo to change how I saw toys forever. In Japan toys are respected and every little detail of the figure is obsessed over. Department stores had finished, painted Gundam models on display that were works of art. Toy sections had giant dioramas with hundreds of figures posed in the clutches of war. My tastes began to gravitate towards the larger 1/6 scale format because of how accurately detailed everything could be portrayed; from sculpt to paint work, to tailoring and poseability. Yeah, okay, they’re dolls, but could you not be impressed by the Hot Toys Robocop and ED-209?
That brings you up to today. Ironically pretty much all the above figures I just wrote about are long gone except for a few select Joes. I wonder sometimes what the landfill-to-collector ratio is on all the old plastic I’ve owned. How much plastic is in my carbon footprint? I always have this Matrix moment when I’m at big flea market and I’m stirring through a box of old toys and I see the same toy—the same beat-up Hot Wheels car or Disney McDonalds Happy Meal toy—at two different vendors. How many flea markets that are going on right now across the country have this same Chinese-made piece of plastic in 50 cent bin? What are the chances of two people coming to the same place at the same time to sell the exact same crap that no one else wants? Two people selling something that they will not allow themselves to be owned by anymore at the same moment in time in nearly the exact same place. Whoa.
I’ll leave with that thought—sorry if I just hurt your brain. I’m really super-excited to be a part of Size Matters and I look forward to contributing some fun stuff here. Thank you for allowing me to bring you into my world and thanks for reading!