The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I put myself on an RSVP list for this enormous bastard today, which just means that they’ll let me know when it’s for sale, which will be good, because it’ll take a while to sell the house so that I can afford it.
Be sure to note the tiny FF members and the Silver Surfer, for scale.
I had another twelve-hour day today and have been grading since I finished dinner, so enjoy the newest addition to my utterly ridiculous assortment of pointless collectibles.
I’m in trouble.
I am moving inevitably into my Elder Nerddom, and while there have been perhaps more statues in my house for several years now than one might expect from a random sample of homes, I have, until now, managed to avoid purchasing anything from Hot Toys. There are a billion reasons for this, but perhaps one of the biggest is that the damn things can run anywhere from $250-500 if not more than that and I knew good and fucking well that there was no way I was ever going to stop with one. My recent disenchantment with the MCU has helped; a lot of the appeal of Hot Toys to their fans is their unearthly skill with facial capture, and as I’ve grown tired of the movies, I’ve grown less interested in the idea of having Chris Evans or Robert Downey, Jr. on my shelf as opposed to a more Platonic, comic-based Iron Man or Captain America.
And today that beautiful bastard up there showed up under the Christmas tree, and I’m fucked now. My wife actually stopped me after I unwrapped the box but before I opened it, telling me that she and the two owners of my local comic shop had gone through a process in trying to decide which one to get me, and that they’d warned her that if I actually opened the box, collectors being who they are, they’d be unable to take it back. She asked me if I wanted her to tell me who was in it (the outside box of a Hot Toys figure has all the brand information but does not actually name the figure inside for some reason) and I told her that if the three of them had managed to guess wrong— my wife has been married to me for nearly sixteen years and I have spent money at the comic shop on a weekly basis for slightly longer than that– I was going to get so much mileage out of making fun of them for it that it would be worth it. Truth be told, I was fully expecting one of the many Iron Mans available.
Moon Knight? Fuck yes, and made even better by the fact that even though that’s Moon Knight’s MCU/Disney+ costume, that costume isn’t really much of a departure from his traditional comic book look and, even better, it’s not Oscar Isaac, since there’s no headsculpt featuring his face. So, yeah, this is perfect and I love you but this is going to cost me so much money, because he’s gonna need a friend, and then they’re gonna need a third, because who are they gonna talk to if they get tired of each other, and by this time next year I expect to have a full glass-front cabinet in the house somewhere with $6000 of these things in it(*) and I plan on regularly reminding my wife that it’s her fault.
(*) I may or may not have just inquired about pre-ordering an Iron Man that didn’t actually ever appear in the films but looks like the Silver Centurion, my favorite Iron Man suit ever.
I promised myself some time ago that, once my credit cards were all paid off, I would reward myself with a lightsaber. Well, I’ve held a $0 credit card balance for a few months now, minus a couple of reasonable things (I paid for the hotel last weekend on one of my cards, then came home and immediately paid it off) and … well, I haven’t ordered a saber yet, because I’ve managed to convince myself I’m still in the “research” stage, thus preventing me from dropping $500 on something that is the absolute pinnacle of “meaningless nerd cruft I don’t need.” Shit, I don’t even know if I like Star Wars any longer; one of the many ways the last several years have sucked is watching a number of things I used to love turn into even more entries into the “shit that makes me tired” category.
But I don’t want this to be another obnoxiously maudlin post; I want to focus on the fact that I am remaining (somewhat) financially disciplined by 1) not wantonly ordering a lightsaber today and further 2) determining that there must be at least twice the cost of said lightsaber in savings before said lightsaber is ordered. Which, okay, isn’t going to hold me for long, but kept me from spending money today.
The above, by the way, hasn’t yet achieved the status of “my lightsaber,” because 1) if it’s a fixed color, the blade is going to be yellow and 2) I’m serious about reading a ton of reviews and doing research here, because I am doing this once and I am not about to start a collection of these fucking things. It looks like the saber I had my eyes on when I first started thinking about this has been discontinued, as I foolishly didn’t bookmark it and now I can’t find the design anywhere, but I don’t want one that looks exactly like one of the official ones. It won’t be unique, of course, as these things are mass-produced, but I don’t want a fellow nerd to be able to look at it and recognize it as Plo Koon’s lightsaber or some shit like that.
I probably ought to put the whole thing off until after I know if there’s going to be a teacher strike later this year, shouldn’t I?
Semi-serious question: anybody wanna buy about four or five thousand comic books?
I’ve been collecting comic books since I was nine years old. Never once in that time have I actually gotten rid of any, and I’m finally hitting the point lately where I really don’t think that my current collection is going to be sustainable for much longer. Mind you, this is not an “I want to stop buying comic books” post– I don’t. I just don’t feel like I need to have all the ones that I currently have for any longer. I’ll probably end up holding on to maybe fifteen to twenty percent of my collection out of sentimental or story value, but most of what’s left I feel like I can get rid of fairly painlessly.
The problem is I don’t want to just throw them away, and any other method of getting rid of comic books doesn’t actually work very well. There’s basically no market in back issue comics any longer– search Ebay for “comic book lots” and you’re going to get a wasteland, although I can’t really believe Ebay is still in business anyway, so maybe that’s not worth much as a data point– and for the most part I don’t have any books that have massively inflated values over whatever their cover price is anyway. My local comic shop doesn’t want them, at least partially because for the last seven years they sold them to me, and they certainly don’t want them back. Libraries won’t deal with comics, and at that point I sort of run out of ideas. Pawn shops? I kinda doubt it. Secondhand places? The nostalgia store in the mall? I’d be surprised.
What’s triggering this is that if I want to keep my collection in any sort of reasonable shape I need to go through and rebox everything about once a year or so. Now, I can just buy new boxes as I go and toss shit into them, but that means that if I ever actually want to find anything ever again it would take eons. I have sixteen longboxes and three shortboxes– so call it seventeen longboxes– of comic books; a longbox holds about three hundred books, give or take.
(Just did the math. The first sentence of this post originally said “three thousand.” Gah.)
Anyway, if I want them to be in any kind of order where I can actually find them again, about once a year I have to buy a couple of new boxes and then spend a day or two interfiling all the stuff I’ve bought over the course of the past year into the collection– which is complicated as hell, because there’s never remotely enough room in the boxes I have, and I have to sort of start from one end and work my way back, moving every single comic I own at least once while I’m putting the new stuff in with the older books. It’s a bloody obnoxious mess and it becomes more obnoxious every year. And judging from the two four-inch-high stacks on my desk and the three full shortboxes next to me, I need to do it again like right now if I don’t want to be buried in these things– and I really don’t want to be buried in these things.
I should stash them all in the basement and not worry about it, but I’m worried that if I do that it would trigger an immediate basement flood– it’s too humid down there for comic books as is– and I’d rather throw them away then lose them in some sort of home disaster. Which is probably kinda stupid but whatever, that’s how my brain works.
So, yeah. Anybody planning on opening a comic book store and want some quick back-issue stuff? Hit me up. Or just come over and steal a bunch of them. If you can get past the dogs you can have them.
Just leave me my Iron Man books. Those, I’m never giving up.
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