Last Wednesday, Slate Magazine delivered the worst news it it could have possibly laid on me :

My action figures are doomed.

I’ve lived, until now, under the safe and ignorant delusion that the Hellboy action figure that I bought last week would be passed down through generations, to lots of nerdy future-families. Like an unchanging beacon, cast perfectly in plastic and paints, he’d remain ageless as my distant alien progeny witnessed the theatrical release of Hellboy 11. This, however, is not the case.

First, we were hit with terrible tales of CD rot – the plastic of CDs was slowly starting to reject and eat away at the metallic, information-rich, printed surfaces that were laid upon them. And it was true! My Oingo Boingo ‘Nothing to Fear’ CD, one of the earliest CDs in my collection, was starting to get veins of cracked and shed metallic inks, despite my obsessively gentle handling of it. As soon as MP3s came along, I digitized the heck outta that CD. For personal use, of course.

Now, we’re witnessing the decay of all kinds of plastics – most noticeably, plastics used in great artworks, because of the pristine and safe conditions in which they’re kept. We might attribute the fading of something in regular household use to other factors, but untouched sculptures have begun to visibly sag and weep strange colors and chemicals, and there is no scientific solution to revert this aging process, short of freezing the works. We’re only now at a point in the history of plastics, which are only around 100 years old, where we can actually see the first signs of decay, and it spells out a whole mess for collectors.

Some plastics, of course, are much more stable than others. Some notorious instances in the world of action figure collecting are Medicom’s 1/6th scale Luke Skywalker, which oozes green liquid even if it’s never been removed from the package, and the cape of the Kia Asamiya Robin (from a series of Batman figural statues), which is perpetually sticky, no matter what you treat it with. The capes of many of Mattel’s Justice League Unlimited figures have taken on a very dusty look as powders seep from the rubber, and the first Lord of the Rings Cave Troll from ToyBiz used a rubber that allowed the face to move realistically, but all too easily cracked and tore because of its instability.

So, while we see plastics as forever, they’re actually very unstable. They’re just very, very slowly expressing this.

So, will my collection of Batmen or my original resin pieces be a vat of mush before I turn 50? Many of these plastics are too new to even be able to accurately determine their true shelf life. It’s something to consider if you’re investing in anything plastic with the purpose of reselling it later. What you bought might not be what you end up selling, so watch your plastic items carefully.

While there’s no chemical advice to come out of this new discovery, the answers seem to be firmly rooted in common sense : keep your stuff out of sunlight, keep it dry and keep it cool.

It’s hard to view my vast collection of plastic monsters as one of those dreaded ‘transient’ collections, but after this disturbing revelation, it encourages me to appreciate these items for the ‘now’ – not without a little bit of sadness. I might be less inclined to drop big bucks on something with the knowledge that it might later turn green and spray all over my walls, but I don’t think I’ll love my little collection of Jack Kirby characters any less. I wasn’t going to be buried with them anyhow.

At least not that you know of.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.