Toy Fair is such a monumental event that even after four days of exploration and thousands upon thousands of words of reminiscence, I’ve barely scraped the surface of its presence. So here’s the rest of it, in record time, with what are sure to be grievous omissions which I’ll apologize for later.

In the past few weeks, I’ve described the offerings of Hasbro, Mattel, DC Direct, Sideshow Collectibles, and a handful of others, as well as posted a large photo gallery of my findings.

Often while traversing the floors of the Javits center, we’d be easily distracted by some other luminous bastion of awesomeness between us and our destination. One such surprise was the Attakus booth, a company based in Montreal which specializes in large-scale statues of Marvel and Star Wars characters, as well as a few smaller statues of the ‘erotic’ and fantasy variety. I’d never seen an Attakus piece in person, since importing things from elsewhere is never a cheap endeavor, but their quality and scale was impressive. We spent quite a lot of time circling their booth, photographing everything, including the awe-inspiring Millennium Falcon replica that was in scale with Hasbro’s 3 3/4” scale figures. Of course, it was only a half-replica, cut down the middle like a spaceship-dollhouse for easy access, but it included every internal and external detail down to the Dejarik Holochess set, with the entire display set up to look like the Rebel escape from the Death Star in A New Hope, complete with the Obi Wan and Darth Vader duel. Reps from neighboring booths were constantly streaming over to take another look inside the Falcon. Our photos of their booth can be seen here.

We also visited Marvel Toys, formerly Toy Biz, and saw their wonderful Legendary Heroes license. They’ve decided that if they can’t do Marvel characters anymore, and DC has the licenses to their own characters tied up in themselves and Mattel, they’d dip into the quirky third-tier of comics and tap the independent publishers for characters, which they’d then execute in their notable, revolutionary style. The initial lineups include both familiar and unfamiliar characters to me, but the first two waves will continue the popular Build-A-Figure theme. If you collect all six figures, you can build a large, unusually complex seventh figure from the extra parts included - a gimmick that has done very well for them over the past few years in their Marvel Legends line. The first set will include a huge Pitt figure from Image Comics, and the second wave will include a Monkeyman (with one of the figures being his partner, O’Brien). People might recognize Savage Dragon, Judge Dredd and Witchblade among the figures, as well as a Conan the Barbarian, but many of the characters elude even a hardcore geekonerd like me. It’s like the 90’s exploded all up in there, but the figures are at least visually interesting enough to support the line. I’m all about Mike Allred’s Madman, this time. Scope out their wares here.

There’s been some contention between Marvel Toys and Shocker Toys, as both sought to pursue licenses from ‘indie’ publishers and creators at the same time, often butting heads and having contracts slip out from each others’ grasps. Shocker Toys has oft been at odds with the toy world in general, being the very apotheosis of the underdog toymaker, fightin’ his way to the top. Their PR model differs greatly from the tried and true traditions of the toy industry, as Shocker has been revealing their hopes and aspirations, figure sculpts in every stage of completion, and sending out brutally honest (and sometimes emotional) statements to the press. The usual model states that toy companies will only talk about things that are 100% secure properties and only show off near-completed items, but Shocker is more organic in their approach. In laying the process bare before any of his touted products have even hit retail, Shocker Toys’ owner Geoff Beckett has created some discomfort for everyone involved. In meeting with him at Toy Fair though, I found him to be a very amicable guy, enthusiastic to a fault about his work. On display were his own series of Indie Spotlight figures, including Scud : The Disposable Assassin, Shadowhawk, and Katchoo from Strangers in Paradise, as well as an in-progress sculpt of my personal favorite character ever, The Maxx. With any luck, I convinced him to include Maxx’s love interest, Julie, in the first set of figures and a Mr. Gone sometime in the future. While these items still have work to be done on them, it’s a good start to what can be a great companion piece to Marvel Toys’ stuff (especially since Maxx and Pitt once battled / teamed up). Shocker Toys also had their in-progress GWAR figures on display, and discussed their rights to make figures of both Metalocalypse and Venture Brothers figures. If they can pull it off, their licenses have more appeal to me than what Marvel Toys has announced. Time will tell if the figures match up to the hype. We have a few photos here.

Bif! Bang! Pow! was a complete surprise with their presentation of some purely beautiful Flash Gordon action figures, designed by photorealistic comic artist and Flash Gordon fanatic Alex Ross. Toy Fair marked the debut of this company and their products, well, anywhere, and they blew us away with these perfect figures, their rights to produce any character in the movie for future waves, and their 12” scale Big Lebowski figures. They’re still looking for more support, so if you want to see these Flash Gordon guys, speak out!

And speaking of 12” figures, we encountered the UK-based Product Enterprise also. The first question out of my mouth was about their Space Vixens line, which has been put ‘on hiatus’ for now, I was informed. Choking back tears, we explored the rest of their booth to see a heavy Dr. Who focus, including an awesome 12” figure of the Tom Baker Who, crazy-ugly scarf and all. In addition to that, they are producing a line of Daleks - or, Dalek-shaped figures as re-painted by a variety of designers, a la Bearbricks and Dunnys - including the urban artist who identifies himself as, coincidentally enough, ‘Dalek’. A desperately needed synergy between art and sci-fi has been reached. Okay, it’s always been there, but no one really talks about it. Character Options had their array of regular 6” Dr. Who figures on display also, representing characters from the newer incarnation of the show.

Finally, we wandered down the ‘urban arts’ / designer section of the Fair before we called it a day and encountered even more items from the growing world of artsy-cute plush things and cute-scary vinyl figures. Most inspiring was UNKL’s booth - a company that recently exploded onto the art toy scene with a staff of only four people, they’re a real inspiration to aspiring toy creators such as myself and my fellow photographer that day. Of course, it inspired talk of ‘let’s quit our jobs!’ and ‘damn the man!’ and ‘let’s go get a sandwich!’ for the rest of the day, but the truth is that they produce some clever little figures (check out their Unipos), and the booth chick was totally cute.

Of course, Toy Fair is only about 5% action figures, but you wouldn’t know it from how I go on about ‘em for the past two weeks. We were stopped by the excited owner of Potty Monkey, a professional pediatric urologist who’d written a book and created a doll to promote good toilet habits. He also offered us a banana, but we declined. That kind of inventive excitement and energy is what makes the fair really come alive. The appearance of the creepy-but-catchy Alien Creole Band bouncing through the main floor and playing music, taking our photos with Spider-Man and the Green Goblin, the life-sized Batman made of Legos, and the display of cleverly animated and assembled wooden kits were only a scant few of the great things that I wish we’d had more time to explore.

But there’s always next year, too.

Well, it’s another cold Saturday in February and I’m off on another monumental New York City Toy Fair journey today, which actually brings my stay here at Collectors’ Quest full-circle. One year ago, I began my charming reportage on Toy Fair 2006 (and the elusive Super Skrull action figure, which I still haven’t found), and in a few days, we’ll have a whole array of Toy Fair 2007 coverage. So, I must ask the question, where has one year of collecting brought me?

It started out with Toy Fair, and in retrospect, every company that I profiled came through on almost all of their promises for the year of toy glory ahead, despite a shaky industry and the questionable cost of oil, and subsequently, plastics. Toy Biz has since become Marvel Toys (though they produce no toys of Marvel characters anymore, oddly) and scrapped their Animated Fantastic Four line of action figures, presumably because the actual cartoon was bad enough to make human being lay eggs. Actual ostrich eggs, from which were borne hellish netherbeings which actually took over Montana for a week or so. Because the cartoon was that bad. Aside from that, I’m still waiting to see the Space Vixens from Product Enterprise. They’ve seen some modifications and name changes, but once they’re out, I’ll be all up ons. Who can resist a saucy space lass? Their inconsistently-working website doesn’t instill confidence, but I’ll wait for you forever, Peggy Ryder. Or Felicity Bliss. Or whatever you’re called now.

February 2006 also saw the inaugural NY Comic Con, for the unmitigated natural disaster that it was. We learned to never, ever underestimate the sheer volume of geeks that would swarm from the woodwork should you ever hold any kind of geek event in NYC. It was long overdue, and those geeks needed to propagate and conquer, years of pent-up awkwardness just screaming to escape. I was there, I was squashed, and I’ll be going again this year, because it’s all we got ‘round these eastern parts. Here’s a tip for any general admission convention attendance : a large backpack might seem like a good idea to store your loot, but it makes walking around almost impossible, especially in an ocean of the predominantly overweight. Nuclear technology now provides convenient, though expensive, solutions for storing your belongings in the 7th dimension, should our clumsy 3rd dimension run out of space. It’s the only way to travel, guys. This year, I’ll be scoring signatures on my Bizarro Comics hardcover again, and I think I’ll even be expanding into the array of creators in the Bizarro World hardcover, just to make the trip worthwhile.

Let’s see… DC Superhero glasses are still awesome, but I still have no living situation where I can line my cabinet space with them to proclaim my hold on geekiness while still living a swingin’ bachelor lifestyle. I’ve begun to wonder if their presence in my life is related to the presence of not-getting-lucky-because-I-seem-like-a-7-year-old, but I have my best scientists working on the statistics as we speak. Findings are inconclusive.

The unwieldy collection of records still grows beyond that metal case of squaredancing records and the sack of 45s, and has expanded into a collection of almost two dozen voice-o-graph records and an additional eBay auction of 40 childrens records that I couldn’t resist. I’ve been contacted by a handful of people who have their own forgotten voice-o-graph and recordio discs, and I’ve offered my services to convert them onto CDs for them. So, if you’re interested, drop me a line. Here’s a sample!.

You probably should have taken notice when I profiled the Women of the DC Universe busts designed by Adam Hughes, as the earlier ones have tripled in value since then. Zombie Heroclix are still incredibly hot and worth about a hundred bucks each.

I’ve learned that eBay is still crawling with unrepentant capitalists, occasionally bordering on the disgusting. With the recent death of Anna Nicole, collectibles featuring her that weren’t worth five bucks three days ago have skyrocketed to hundreds of dollars, and forget about the fabled Astronaut Love Triangle. There are eBay sellers selling what they purport to be Nowak’s diapers, left behind in her frantic road trip. There’s no eBay record for anything with her name on it previous to this incident, and a current seller of an autographed photo of her includes an unflattering story of the astronaut in question in her item description. I’ve learned from this that cannibalism is alive and well in the United States, and should I ever want to give up my soul, I could make a quick buck by hopping on that sensational train of the news du jour and fabricate pseudo-collectibles. I can only hope that some other quirky celebrity dies an untimely death or has a public freakout so I can afford that new iPod.

For the record, I completed my 24 Hour Comic, Owl and Ghost, and the entire universe loved the dickens out of it. After its internet publication, I’d trade a painting for a scarf (yes, for a growing scarf collection) and a knit hat with the titular ghost stitched onto it, by the amazing Melissa Stanley.

The year finished off with me digging into the back of my closets and parting with everything that I was not passionately in love with in order to make room for my more current loves. Hundreds of toys were opened, breaking their mint-in-package values and going into storage cabinets or displays. I’ve learned that toys, while conveniently stackable inside of packages, are so much more fun when you set them free. Monetary value be damned, my Alex Ross Plastic Man is an incredible figure, and he needs to breathe. In the current climate of toy collecting, many folks are looking for solid figures to complete teams or displays and mint packaging plays less and less into the perceived value of the item. Sure, there are a good deal of hardcore collectors who only collect sealed figures, but there are just as many who appreciate them out of the package. Tell me my Iron Man display isn’t worth a million bucks.

I’ve realized that it’s not the easiest of tasks to live a normal life and collect things at the same time, but we the collectors are actually infinitely wise investors. Somewhere out there, there’s someone else who wants exactly what you have, and when you connect (and your relationship with the object in question needs to end), you stand to profit in more ways than one. Who’d have thought that an old set of Adult Superstars action figures (which were sent to me as a free promotion, might I add) would now be worth hundreds of dollars now to some other collector? We’re treasure hunters, and the newest frontier is the back of our collective closets.

Here’s to another year of collecting. I’ve been able to chronicle my collecting and loves here on Collectors’ Quest (and soon, you’ll be able to also - stay tuned), but if you collect, start a journal. Give a page or two to every genre of item you collect and see what amasses over a year. It’s a lot more than you’d think.

So, it’s pretty much generally agreed upon that action figures are awesome, and if you don’t agree, I’ll meet you behind the cafeteria after school and we’ll settle it once and for all. They represent interesting characters, they’re posable, and you can play with them. So, what do you do when you want to bring these same characters into a world where you don’t have to look at unsightly cut-joints and generic factory paint jobs? When you want a finely crafted sculpture of your favorite character? Why, you make your own!

There are a variety of companies who make outstanding full-body statues of heroic characters, but these usually sell for hundreds of dollars. You might not want to put off buying dinner for a few nights just so you can have a sculptural representation of The Thing poised neatly between your Hummel figurines, though I venture there’s nothing that deserves clobbering much more than Hummel figurines. The other option is to purchase a kit to make your own superhero, with your own colors and craftsmanship. If you assemble it well, it will completely defy anything that you can purchase pre-made.

While the world of hobby models is dominated by vehicles and inappropriate anime girls, there’s a small and exciting section of super hero model kits that have been mass-produced primarily by Toy Biz and Horizon. Cast from inexpensive vinyl, they present a much more economical and fun way to display various comic characters. Both companies no longer produce these models, but the Toy Biz models are still fairly easy to find at very cheap prices, and there’s an interesting (and very possibly illegal) overseas market that produces duplicates the Horizon models.

The Toy Biz models focus on Marvel Characters that are in a scale which matches most action figures, about 7 or 8 inches tall. They’re generally regarded as cheap and flimsy, but I’m of the school of thought that if you’re going to get a model kit, you’re going to have to do a LOT of work to make it look good. These models have some great, dynamic poses and come with small dioramas to place them in, and if you assemble them right, you’ll never be able to even tell that they’re made of cheap plastic. There are various ways to make the models feel less hollow, but from a visual standpoint, they’re solid.

Horizon models, on the other hand, are seen as much higher quality materials. They’re made of solid parts, and in a larger 1/6th scale also, meaning that a character who is six or seven feet tall in the comics will be about a foot tall in model form. The poses aren’t quite as fluid and exciting as the Toy Biz stuff, but the range of characters is wider, and the larger models are more formidable in appearance and generally easier to assemble. Original Horizon model kits can reach some high prices, but a quick eBay search for ‘vinyl model kits’ will result in hundreds of auctions in Asian countries for startlingly similar models. These are called ‘re-casts’, which an individual or small copyright-be-damned company has taken an original model kit and reproduced it by making their OWN molds from the pieces in the kit. They’re usually not perfect and will have many more flaws than the official kit, and may suffer from warping and bubbling, but there’s no damage that can’t be repaired with some skillful hands, a hair dryer and some putty. They will not come with instructions, and will probably just be bagged in plastic with a blurry photo of what the final model SHOULD look like, so there’s always a risk of getting an inferior product.

The vinyl model kits will take many hours of assembly and a good variety of equipment, ranging from cyanoacrylate glue to razors, paintbrushes and paints, clamps and an absurd amount of patience, but to transform something from cheap, bright plastic into a smooth work of art is a powerful feeling. There are many online tutorials to guide you through, as well as tricks that you’ll figure out along the way, and in the end, you’ll have a unique piece to add to your collection. You can also occasionally purchase completed model kits, which again reach into the hundred-dollar range if they’re assembled well.

I find them to be exceptionally thrilling, so I recently imported ten Horizon re-casts from Asia for about one hundred bucks plus shipping, all of which appear to be of solid quality. Sure, I don’t exactly have the time or space to set up a foot-tall, hand-painted Iron Man right now, but when I do, he’ll totally kick your butt.