Aragorn Under Glass
04.14.07 By Collin DavidI’ve mentioned it before, but one of my many hats involves me working at a library, day in and day out for almost ten years now, much of it during weekends and evenings. It’s a small-town library, patronized half by unusual mountainfolk and half by new, young, well-off families moving into the areas where all of the trees were just chopped down from the backyards of the increasingly irate mountainfolk. I envision some kind of all-out battle to the death between the two diverse factions, Pelennor Fields style, and when the last crazy mountain hermit is slain, I pick through the wreckage for wallets and necklaces made from skulls of the local ‘varmints’, and leave town forever. At the end of it all, I hope to have enough of my soul left to regrow it in full, like those Magic Grow Crystals or Brainiac 13.
On the childrens’ floor of this library, there’s a glass display case near the entrance that’s often filled with books relevant to the season or a library event. It was recently suggested that I put my vast action figure collection to use in said display case… but what figures did I have that were related to literature?
As it turns out, just about all of them.
At the moment, the library system buzz is all about bringing young adults into libraries. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but one excellent way to lure these kids into libraries is the graphic novel, which are only now being lent legitimacy by the American Library Association as ‘the next big thing’. I like to think that I was way, way ahead of my time and the rest of the world is just catching up to my love of Mr. Mxyzptlk.
It’s easy to forget that Batman is actually a literary character. Sure, he’s usually accompanied by pictures and movies with sculpted rubber suit-nipples, but before anything else, he was written. The same goes for every legitimate superhero, and with these things earning literary credibility (with much help from Neil Gaiman’s multi-award winning adult-themed Sandman series), it was now okay to talk about ‘comic books’ in libraries. I don’t have to say that I ‘collect action figures’ anymore. I can say that I ‘collect articulated scale replicas of supernatural literary characters’. And then I could get punched in the face.
It wasn’t without hesitation that I started loaning out my action figures to the display, all perfectly preserved and complete in tupperware drawers and arranged on shelves. I’m the kind of person who likes to have everything at arm’s length… just in case. Just in case the nearby dam springs a Gollum-shaped hole and I need to plug it. You know. After the display got a lock on it, I carted in my Lord of the Rings collection (yes, also literary characters, believe it or not!) and left it in the hands of our childrens’ librarian.
Sure, she put an orc on a horse instead of a Warg, and prologue Bilbo doesn’t really belong near the other Hobbits, but it looks great. Treebeard clutches a Hobbit in his mighty hand, a slain warrior lies at the feet of Sauron. Some of the local kids set up the bottom shelf, which gave me a momentary palpitation when I learned of it, but everything checks out just fine, and toys are for kids anyhow, right?
I wasn’t so much a curator as a guy who happened to have a lot of related crap lying around. When I first unleashed these guys from their blister cards many years ago, I was hanging out in the dorms with my girlfriend and her roommate, and we all took part opening and examining the figures, so it was in this spirit of sharing that I loaned out my collection. When I lived in the dorms, I left a lot of my figures out and my roommate Brian would set them up in amusing poses when I was out of the room, which was always hilarious to come back to. Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus learned a lot about each other in those days…. but it’s never about having something, it’s about sharing.
Plus, what’s cooler than spending an afternoon with two cute girls and a dozen Lord of the Rings figures? The best of both worlds.
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Article Tags: action figures, American Library Association, display, library, Neil Gaiman================
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