We’ve talked plenty about mass-retail action figures, but some of us collectors have more refined tastes. A bowl of chirashi over a conversation about post-modernist painting, perhaps some Chopin before a crackling fireplace, and the episodes of Sliders before the show got really, really stupid. And Sideshow Collectibles, of course, which has been producing beautifully crafted, higher-end proprietary collectibles in force for just under a decade.

Sideshow has made a name for themselves by being the premiere creators and distributors of meticulously crafted, researched and realized 12” figures, including famous Universal Studios movie monsters, reproductions of historical figures, characters from The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone, the James Bond films, Monty Python, and more recently, Hellboy, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. They’ve even scaled-up a lot of these figures and doubled their sizes, offering ‘Premium Format’ figures to those collectors with room to spare. Personally, I found myself collecting every Hellboy figure that they had to offer, going out of my way to find convention-exclusive items, and eventually, purchasing actual screen-worn movie props. You don’t know ‘collecting’ until you’ve collected Jeffrey Tambor’s pants. That’s when people start to wonder.

Beyond these things, Sideshow also is responsible for a large number of museum-quality busts and statues, movie prop replicas and fine art pieces, as well as importing hard-to-find Medicom products from Japan, which include both anime and Marvel Comics properties. When we stopped at their Toy Fair booth, all of these items were on display, a vast myriad of high-priced low-brow glory.

The Sideshow booth is always friendly and casual. At my first Toy Fair, I was uninitiated and nervous. unfamiliar with the strange customs and rituals of the toy people, but Sideshow was very welcoming of our awkward investigative reporting. We were left to our own devices as we circled the booth slowly, snapping a ton of photos. One gets the impression of being in an antiques store – you’re afraid to MOVE, lest you knock something beautiful and precious over.

Without discussing every single amazing item on display, the standout pieces this year were the Marvel Comiquettes, which are roughly 15” – 20” tall statues of some exciting Marvel characters, starting with Iron Man and Wolverine, both in the $200 range. These pieces are by far the best interpretations of these characters that I’ve seen in any 3D format, and the metallic, radiant sheen on Iron Man is beautiful enough to convince me to order him. As with many items made by Sideshow, both of these items have a limited-edition, early bird pre-order version, in addition to the regular versions. If you happen to have pre-ordered these items at Sideshow’s website soon after they were put up for order (usually around 1 PM ET on Fridays), you’ll receive a bonus piece. In the cases of Wolverine and Iron Man, you get bonus, unmasked heads in addition to the regular heads, which are easily interchangeable.

Many of Sideshow’s pre-orders run like this, and while many of their pieces sell at secondary retailers for a slightly lower price, ordering the items directly from the site is the only way to attain these bonus pieces. These pre-ordering times are massive collector events, and sometimes the exclusive versions sell out in under 30 minutes. The regular versions of these items, which are produced in much higher numbers, usually remain in quantity for a few days, so it’s a website to constantly watch if you want to keep on top of things.

The other standout items were Sideshow’s Star Wars 12” and Premium Format figures. Having recently acquired the license from Lucasfilms, Sideshow is visiting all 6 Star Wars films at once, in a variety of interesting characters. The line of Premium Format figures are about two feet tall, and feature authentic costume detailing, directly referenced from the films, and occasionally, small electronics for illumination. Included in this line are Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Obi Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader and Princess Leia, as well as General Grievous, the asthmatic robot from the newer films. I had the pleasure of winning a Premium Format Darth Vader, with a retail value of $350, during one of Sideshow’s many online events. Where I’m going to display a 2’ Vader, I don’t know, but I venture that I’ll have to sleep with him. Thankfully, that’ll be the only time I use the phrase ‘sleep with him’ in terms of what I’ll do for collecting.

The Star Wars 12” line will be the first time that we get film-accurate, stunningly detailed figures from the Star Wars films. Hasbro has put out some mass-market 12” versions of some of these characters before, but none with the high-end attention to detail that Sideshow has to offer. They’ve broken the line down into a few categories – Order of the Jedi (to include all characters who are Jedi), Heroes of the Rebellion (to include all other heroic figures), and at least one more undetermined category, likely to include villains, bounty hunters and other various aliens. None of these have been released yet, but 5 different figures have gone up for pre-order, from throughout the Star Wars timeline. I usually don’t touch anything that happened after Return of the Jedi, but I couldn’t resist a 12” figure of Kit Fisto, the Jedi with asparagus hair.

Like the Comiquettes, all of these Star Wars figures had Sideshow-exclusive items if you were among the first to order them. Princess Leia comes with an alternate blaster, Han Solo comes with a giant magnetic space-manta, Kit Fisto comes with a decapitated droid head, and so on.

Even Lord of the Rings lives on in both 12” and Premium Format figures, with Aragorn recently being put up for pre-order and Legolas displayed for the first time at Toy Fair. Lord of the Rings people are a very strange and dedicated group, sometimes bordering on ‘savant’, but I love ‘em. They can recite every township that the Fellowship passed by on their journey to Mount Doom, in Elvish, while making fictionally-accurate lembas bread, but they can’t comb their hair. I went to a meeting of The Tolkien Society once, and then I spent the next three days cowering under the blankets. Sure, I collected every LOTR action figure from Gimli to Theoden, but I’ll be damned if I know how many arrows Legolas fired at Ugluk on the 5th day of Lammastide. These people… they know.

Only these two figures have been announced so far, as the line has only just begun and they’re released at a rate of one per month, at a price of around 60 bucks each, giving us time to breathe and recoup and sell that ever-replenishing font of money that I like to call ‘plasma’.

Click around on SideshowToys.com for everything else that they have to offer. It’s something that collectors who spend all of their time in real, actual stores might not have noticed before, and it’s ridiculously good stuff.

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Article Tags: convention, figures, Hellboy, Javitz, Marvel, Medicom, NYC, Sideshow Collectibles, Star Wars, Toy Fair, ToyFair

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