DC

In November of 2008, the popular collectible miniature game Heroclix was pronounced dead.

Heroclix was, and remains, the only published game where you can effectively and officially make teams of your favorite DC and Marvel heroes and bad guys and pit them against one another on a battlefield, using tiny figures that display a wide array of numbers and symbols to describe each character’s attributes. You could make DC’s Superman fight Marvel’s Hulk – and not only that, but you could make at least six or seven different incarnations of each do battle.

(Of course, Superman’s flight and ranged combat ability would give him the upper hand, but the Hulk could probably do some serious damage if you get him angry enough, or if you use ’smart’ Hulk with the giant gun.)

Over the game’s evolution, WizKids released over two dozen different sets of characters from throughout the universe of comic books. I was a pretty dedicated player from the moment that the game was released, and introduced many, many of my friends to it. We staged battles in my dorm room, over the internet, and anywhere we could find the time and space. We ran to the WizKids booth at ToyFair and got sneak peeks at production samples and asked prying questions. In short, we were fans.

The game evolved, the rules changed, and eventually, things got a bit too complicated for me to casually enjoy anymore. I gave up the game itself when I lost the ability to fly in Iron Man carrying The Thing and have him destroy everything in his path in one big move – but I kept on collecting the figures. Tiny superheroes are keen. Topps purchased WizKids, and before too long, Topps decided to very, very suddenly kill off WizKids, stunning the gaming community, as well as employees who were sent scrambling for new work. Just like every high school in the US, they were deciding to put all of their available funds towards sports-related things and leave the artists and nerds in the gutter. I’m not making this up – this was in the official statement. They did, however, decide to keep such wholesome, intelligent, and not at all alarming things as ‘Baby Bottle Pops’.

I kept my Heroclix. They were still useable, and almost every major and minor comic character had been made already – from Captain America to Zombie Colonel America, Frankenstein to MODOK – and even a gigantic Fin Fang Foom piece. There were talks of small gaming companies banding together to keep the game alive, but nothing came to fruition. Licensing Marvel and DC characters is not cheap.

In September of 2009, NECA quietly displayed a Heroclix piece at one of their convention booths. This was enough to stimulate hope and interest throughout the entire gaming community once again. Almost a year to the day of Heroclix meeting an untimely death, NECA released the ‘Hammer of Thor’ set, based on the titular Marvel Comics superhero – and still using the reconstructed WizKids to keep things in order.

While I don’t know if this ranks among the great comebacks of popular things pronounced dead, like Polaroid film, Justice League Unlimited action figures or Futurama, it’s certainly something that we gamers can all appreciate. Now, we can pit ‘Thor, Frog of Thunder’ against, oh, let’s say Ambush Bug.

If that last sentence made you at all excited, you’re a nerd. Welcome home. Let’s game.

As a collector who often seeks to complete ongoing collections, I can appreciate what Scott Beatty is going for in his 200-page tome, The DC Comics Action Figure Archive. Indeed, I’ve learned to love the process of archiving things both as a librarian and as an overactive collector who needs to keep things organized lest they ultimately serve as the seeds of my destruction.

The DCCAFA is full of great photographs of toys, cut out arranged in a familiar ‘DK Guide’ style against white backgrounds, with clear labels and brief descriptions that include information about the year of production, the company of origin and accessories that each figure came with. The figures in the book (all, obviously, based on DC Comics characters, so no Spider-Men here), range from companies like the now-defunct Mego, Kenner, and ToyBiz, to Hasbro, DC Direct, and Mattel – all of whom have produced DC toys at some point and get equal time on the pages. This collection of toys displayed next to each other, especially in the vast Batman section, really shows the evolution of the action figure as both collectible and plaything, while the entire book presents the lowly action figure as a not-so-lowly evolving art form and idea that is somehow granted further validity by putting it all in a big, hardcover book. You know, like when you put pin-ups in hardcovers and suddenly they’re ‘art’ and not ‘perverse’.

The discussion of figure making and figure history is minimal as the author presumes a certain level of previous experience with figures on the part of the reader, with the book’s main focus being on the toy photos peppered throughout the columns of descriptions. It serves as a survey of very basic figure information, and an excellent starting point towards completing your own collection. All of the figures are arranged alphabetically throughout, though by character name, and not the series that they appeared in. Most listings are only a few words, with actual pictures appearing for random figures throughout. While I’d love to see every Lex Luthor standing side by side, this is, again, a ’starting point’.

By the definition of the book, ‘action figure’ includes things like Minimates and Pocket Heroes, but omits statues and static things like Heroclix and pewter figurines.

Despite the thoroughness, the book cuts off in the middle of 2007 – which is one of the perils of paper publishing encyclopedic references, especially in a digital age. Mattel’s DC Universe and JLU lines, and DC Direct’s many line, have made significant additions towards this archive in the short time since publication. The pages aren’t arranged in a format that would be especially welcoming towards an updated edition (though there’s a ton of white space on every page) – so don’t expect an ‘every toy ever’ perspective, but so look forward to the pretty pictures. Page 130 seems to omit the DC Superheroes Mongul figure that was released in early 2007. but I’ll allow that it was probably released on the cusp of when the book was being sent to the publishers. Also note that page 140’s ‘The Penguin’ (in the upper right hand corner) has the wrong image attached to it. The pictured Penguin is actually from ‘The New Batman Adventures’, and is very different from the details listed for ‘The Batman’ Penguin. Page 109 misidentifies two of the Killer Crocs listed on the page. So what I’m saying is ‘proceed with caution, but remain delighted’. This is probably the last point that the entirety of the DC action figure world can be encapsulated in a single book this handsomely.

… or what’s left of it.

Toy Fair begins again this year on February 17th and runs through the 20th. It all happens in NYC, on the far West Side at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, as well as a few showrooms scattered throughout nearby locations. Don’t think of showing up here, though – it’s only for retailers, vendors, and reporters. It’s no secret that I fashioned my own news outlet about five or six years ago to worm my way past the screening process, and it worked. I’ve come back every year since, under more reputable means.

In that first year, it was an overwhelming explosion of everything I’d ever wanted to see and had read about in toy magazines. My fellow writer and I wandered the convention floor wide-eyed and faking our way through it pretty convincingly. Until recently, it was THE PLACE to see everything that your favorite companies were going to release over the next year, and companies reserved their new products and surprises for opening day.

As the years have been progressing, Toy Fair has been shrinking, and it was never more clear than last year’s adventure to the ‘Toy Towers’, a popular location for smaller showrooms. They’d been almost abandoned, with showrooms locked, vacated and falling apart. During this time that Toy Fair was shrinking, companies have also been vanishing and shrinking. Palisades Toys suddenly closed up shop, and ToyBiz-turned-Marvel Toys doesn’t seem to produce anything anymore. I don’t know what this says for the toy industry, as I’m no industry analyst, but the landscape of toys is changing.

This year, don’t expect to see the amazing Sideshow Toys booth reported in photographs, as their Toy Fair attendance will be entirely online, as will SOTA Toys’. Seeing Sideshow Toys’ stuff in person was usually what motivated me to spend exorbitant amounts of money on their stuff for the subsequent year, too. Still, shipping all of their new (and often very heavy) product to New York, renting a crazy-expensive Javits booth, and shipping everything back home is surely a painful expense to have to absorb, especially when there’s no actual money changing hands – just the potential for future sales.

Many of these companies have now taken to holding onto their ‘big reveals’ until one of the two major Comic Cons in New York and San Diego, where the fans can see things in person and the impact on the potential purchaser is more direct and unfiltered. Where Toy Fair in the US is fading, Toy Fairs in the UK and Hong Kong are picking up steam. I’d love to see the amazing Toy Fair in Asia, surely filled with beautiful things that we might not regularly hear about over here. Asia has a very different toy market, which actually acknowledges adult collectors.

This isn’t to say that our Toy Fair still doesn’t have a ton to offer and a lot of crazy, fun things flying around the convention floor. While potentially boring licensing stuff takes up a lot of the floorspace (like, let’s stick Spider-Man’s face on this trampoline, this ice cream scoop and this pair of underoos kind of stuff), inventors make up the rest of it – small ideas gaining momentum, some of them inspired and some of them insipid, but it’s all interesting. There’s still so much to see that I almost find it necessary to narrow my focus to action figure stuff, or else I’d never make it down a single aisle, what with all of the bright colors and flashing lights and samples to play with – which is exactly what moves the toy industry, at its core – so maybe things aren’t so bleak after all. Just for us adults who can’t let their toys go.

So, what does this whole turn mean for action figures? For one, prices are going up. The oil needed to make the toys themselves, and then to deliver them, is more expensive than ever – and it would seem that this weeds out a lot of smaller companies hoping to make limited runs on things, and major companies are absorbing more and more licenses from smaller companies. So, the field is narrowing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean better figures and quality control – just less options. There are a few outstanding action figure lines, like Mattel’s DC Universe Classics, but this quality is usually generated by collector feedback, not plain ol’ marketing research. A certain model of transparency and interactivity is being adopted by these companies, which also explains the increased interest in fan events over media events. Everything is still ridiculous leaps and bounds above what we saw at Toy Fair 15 years ago – which amounted to lines of chunky, static action figures that didn’t do anything and only barely looked like who they were supposed to be, and the idea that a few good companies are working to increase every possible figural quality (instead of just cranking out licensed junk) is enough to keep me positive about collecting.

Now, if we could only get these toys consistently enough into stores to prevent high auction prices when they’re scalped up to be re-sold by that greasy guy who’s banging on the doors of the Toys ‘R’ Us at 9:58, demanding to be let in. I hate that guy – but he doesn’t get to go to ToyFair, so I win. At life. And hygiene.

Stay tuned all week for images & news from Toy Fair 2008.

It all starts with Bruce Timm. If you need to blame anyone for why I am the way I am, blame Bruce Timm. And maybe Swiss Cake Rolls, which you can blame the fat parts on.

In 1992, ‘Batman : The Animated Series‘ debuted. I was 11 years old, and I wasn’t really that into superheroes at all, if you can believe it. My kind of superheroes were made of pixels and fought their way through The Mushroom Kingdom and sometimes had wizardly beards and summoned dragons for magical stuff. Still, something about the serious, dark and brooding atmosphere of ‘Batman’ changed everything, despite its lack of orcs and bugbears. It was a cartoon that didn’t depend on slapstick humor, bright colors, punchlines or any modicum of goofiness, and it got my attention more with a whisper than a bang – and I wasn’t the only one who was hypnotized.

Bruce Timm had come along and revolutionized the way that we thought of animation. It could be beautiful and fluid, and be incredibly simple at the same time. In fact, the less lines and details that there were in a character, the better and more convincingly they seemed to move, even if the details of the character itself were minimized. Timm’s interpretations of characters from Batman to Killer Croc to The Penguin and Catwoman all melded seamlessly with the timeless Art Deco landscape of his Gotham City.

After a few other heroic characters from the DC Universe made appearances in Batman’s show, the collective appetite of an audience of cartoon fans was whetted for more. In 1996, Superman got his own similarly animated show, and in 2001, ‘Justice League‘ premiered, incorporating a larger number of Timm-inspired and designed heroes to the ‘DCAU’, or ‘DC Animated Universe’. This evolved into ‘Justice League Unlimited’ after a few seasons, which ostensibly gained the license to use each and every DC character somehow in any given episode, and it often did. And it was exciting to see a little cartoony Etrigan the Demon or Captain Marvel battling it out across the TV, for the first time in full motion. The minimalist Art Deco style of the characters somehow flowed seamlessly into a more modern environment.

By this time, the series had evolved into an action figure line, and against everything that action figure collectors collectively clamor for and whine about, the series remains a massive success. Sure, they’re in a tiny 4” tall scale, and they have barely any articulation at all, and most of them can’t stand up on their own, but there’s so damned MANY of them. I recently went through my own collection and catalogued them for our Community Section, so check ‘em out. Mattel takes the ‘Star Wars’ approach to making JLU action figures, inasmuch as any character that might have had half of their face appear in a crowd scene once warrants an action figure, and I love it. Recently, the newer figures have been exceptionally difficult to find, so collectors have been raising alarms about this scarcity – myself included this time. I want a Mr. Miracle, darnit, and I’m not paying 50 bucks for a 4-inch Volcana figure – which eBay is asking right now. None of this collecting was made any easier by hard-to-get convention exclusives like Solomon Grundy, and a Green Lantern Hal Jordan figure that Mattel released only to employees at a company party.

The interesting thing about these figures is not that there are so many, but this ‘animated style’ that was originated by Bruce Timm’s artwork has spanned across divides between all manner of properties – things that have never been animated are now being created as sculptures and action figures in this simplified ‘animated style’. Why? Because it’s just so neat. While it defies traditional toy logic to create an action figure or sculpture line that doesn’t immediately match up to an existing property exactly as it appears, it’s happening. Collectors routinely decry anything that doesn’t exactly match with what it’s supposed to be, and yet, these interpretations are successful.

Gentle Giant didn’t go the action figure route, but went significantly more monumental with the animated style, creating an interesting series of mini-statues, or ‘animaquettes’, of a large array of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Pirates of the Caribbean characters. While I haven’t been sucked into the Lord of the Rings or Pirates stuff (yet), I absolutely fell in love with Animated Darth Vader and Princess Leia… and I have my eye on a Chewbacca and maybe an Emperor.

Pirates of the Caribbean has extended itself beyond these statues and the array of action figures that were created for the franchise’s movies, and suddenly, ‘animated style’ figures have been popping up under the name ‘Swashbucklers’.

The now-defunct Palisades Toys was probably the first company to breach this animated void, when they created their ‘Witchblade Animated’ toys in the early 2000s, despite the fact that the comic series Witchblade wasn’t animated until 2007. Recently, McFarlane toys also added a whole mess of ‘animated’ toys to the world of Spawn action figures, and while ‘Spawn’ was actually a semi-successful HBO cartoon a while back, it wasn’t in the style that these figures appear in. This minimalist design style has been just that infectious.

Time to go pop in some DVDs and fight off the effects of anime destroying Saturday mornings as we knew them.

If anything can be said about the large community of comic artists and writers (and to an extent, readers), it’s that they function like a small town – everyone knows everyone else, has had some interaction with them, might have some ongoing political debate that the rest of the world has no interest in or awareness of, but ultimately, there’s a closeness and an innate desire to help each other out when times get rough. We’ve seen our share of illnesses and deaths, and I’ve never experienced an instance where respect was not properly paid.

So, the comic-reading audience collectively mourned in late 2006 when we learned that notable creator and artist Dave Cockrum passed away due to complications with a long-time illness. He’s most noted for being a co-creator to some staple X-Men characters, including Colossus, Storm, and Nightcrawler, as well as redesigning and thus redefining DC Comics’ Legion of Superheroes. In addition to that, he’s had a hand in just about every comic you can name, in one way or another – Fantastic Four, Iron Man and Spider-Man covers, Batman and Justice League interiors, Marvel’s Star Trek comics, and even pre-career letters to the editor found in the back pages of a handful of comics. When he passed, a significant creative force passed as well.

As most comic creators are, he was also a comic collector, and as collectors here, we’ve all idly wondered what our poor families are going to do with our stuff when we’re no longer around to deal with it. After his passing, his widow was left with a significant comic collection.

Enter Clifford Meth : writer, advocate for comic creators, and close friend of my most favorite author, Harlan Ellison (which terrifies me to no end) – mostly because I’ve always imagined Mr. Ellison at the top of a gargoyle-riddled watchtower with a typewriter, a shotgun, and the largest NO TRESPASSING sign known to man. You could see it from space. Even before Dave Cockrum’s death, Clifford Meth (along with Neal Adams) arranged a benefit to help Cockrum’s failing health and increasing poverty, and while that afforded him some more comfortable final years, Meth’s efforts still continue, providing continuing comfort for the family.

Meth has single-handedly been arranging the sale of Cockrum’s vast comic collection, eschewing the fee-riddled venue of eBay and depending on word-of-mouth and the admiration of comic fans – which shouldn’t be underestimated. Nothing says ‘disposable income’ like income that’s spent on costumed superheroes. Meth stopped by the blog here a few days ago to make mention of this, and I thought that it deserved a much larger mention that a blog comment. The frequently-updated comic listings can be seen at his blog, The Clifford Method. Each comes bagged, boarded, and with seal indicating that it has come from the Estate of Dave Cockrum. Beyond even this, Mr. Meth is selling some of his own comics, all checks payable to Paty Cockrum.

There’s a certain appeal to owning a comic that’s been read and appreciated by someone intimately involved with the medium. Included in the assortment are comics that Cockrum referenced while drawing his own art, books that he’d worked on, and books that he just liked. Swing on by the blog and buy some books, and don’t think of it as charity – think of it as genuine and well-deserved appreciation.

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