Ooooh, shiny!

justin monkey, Popular Culture, Ravings, Vinyl Leave a Comment

hoardstackI’m the first to admit it: I’m a hoarder. Worse than that, I have tendencies towards being a completist hoarder. That’s the worst kind there is. Anyone who has been near my home “workspace” can tell you: I’m just a spark away from a fiery inferno of vinyl death. Probably my only saving grace in all of this is that I am very anal when it comes to my hoarding.  I’m relatively neat with my collecting and I’d rather not have anyone mess around with most of the pieces, so a lot is in display cases. The display cases, along with the packaging from absolutely every little piece I’ve purchased, all stack up nicely (well, as nice as a 1:20 Devil’s Peak replica of cardboard boxes can be considered).

It all started with LEGO and Star Wars figures. Somewhere along the way, I found the evil, evil Japanese company Medicom and their collaborations with Japanese horrorcore band Balzac and the Misfits. As mentioned previously, I was already in the swing of a pretty heavy comic book addiction during this time, so that also shrank my “workspace” considerably.

I ran pretty willy-nilly for several years: picking up a variety of different properties for one reason or the other; not really settling on a single variety of small plastic crap to focus on. During this “era of discovery,” I found things about the products produced by certain companies that I really liked, and aspects that just pissed me off. So, I started focusing my piles.

The first vinyl property I honed in on was Kidrobot’sDunny. I got in when the Azteca line hit the streets and quickly snatched up whatever I could find. Not satiated with the 3″ variety, I jumped headlong into the 8″ Dunny offerings as well and managed to amass a pretty good collection of moderately rare pieces pretty damn quickly without breaking the bank. That, however, didn’t hold my attention for long. Sure, I still buy the new 3″ Dunny releases, but I’ve sold off a majority of the 8″ monsters that I picked up. What can I say, I get fickle.

Somewhere in my Kidrobot coma, I re-discovered Frank Kozik. Back in college I had picked up several concert posters that Frank had done and was quite familiar with his work in that regard. I had no idea he had moved on into vinyl collectibles. As usual, I went overboard. First I tried to scavenge all of the Labbits that Frank had produced. For those not in the know, Labbits are Frank’s generic rabbit design that smokes a cigarette. Oddly enough, the form is based off of Frank’s old cat. From Labbits, I moved on to Dr. Bombs (an odd surgeon elephant thing with a scalpel and old-school bowling-ball styled bomb). That dropped me into the realm of Toy2r.

Toy2r doesn’t only produce the Dr. Bomb, they also produce Qee (their “generic” platform collectible), and several other “boutique” lines. Qee, like Dunny, are generic as hell and jazzed up by various global artists. Small, relatively cheap, and very accessible: I, therefore, must have them all.

I think you see where this is going. I tend to load up on one particular thing until, for some reason, my attentions pivot to another property or company. It really is the epitome of vicious cycle. Now I constantly lust over pieces from Span of Sunset, threeA, Super7 and RealxHead. Yup, that last one isn’t even in English and I watch it like a hawk for new releases.

One of these days, I’m just going to take the ceiling out and spread into the attic. Heaven forbid if I ever have to move all this crap out of the house. What’s that? I could change my hoarder ways and stop buying all this useless crap?  Now where is the fun in that?

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