Birthday Money – The Climb #938

Friday 17th September 2021

As many of you know, in a previous life I used to be very active in the collectibles world. I ran a site called Action-Figure which focused on bringing all the latest collectible news from around the globe. I got to travel. I met some amazing people. And I got to see a lot of cool toys.

My childhood was filled with Star Wars and G I Joe / Action Force but over the years running A-F whilst I got sent and bought a lot of toys, there were only a few lines I truly collected. Star Wars 3.75”, G I Joe, Muppets and Marvel Legends.

I love great articulation and ToyBiz were the best at it. The figures got me more heavily into the comics and to this day I’m reading a load of Marvel back issues.

I stopped collecting around the time I stepped away from A-F. I put hours a day into the site and needed a new direction. I’d run out of space for toys, a lot of the great toy companies were gone, and Legends had gone to Hasbro where the figures just seemed like cheap bootlegs by comparison.

However, they’ve got progressively better, and I picked a few up on offer back in the spring. That’s slowly turned into me collecting them.

Now a sensible person would limit themselves. There’s a lot of figures: Spider-Man retro waves, movie waves, comic waves, but I’m driven by the hunt of a bargain and so have been picking them up here and there for the last couple of months.

I’d been unable to justify myself buying entire waves in one go though. I buy a few, then slowly hunt down the rest so I can complete the Build-A-Figure. I have an abomination here missing a leg and the figure I need is so rare that it’s 3 times retail on ebay. This has taught me a lesson.

As a result, I’ve held off buying new waves until I could buy them all, and had been telling myself that come my birthday and got given any money, it would go towards buying some of the tsunami of waves that have come out.

And so today has been spent doing that… hunting down figures from waves I have incomplete (no luck on Abomination’s leg though) picking up bargain box sets that don’t belong to any wave, getting those box sets that seem to be selling out, and buying an entire wave (Shang Chi).

The end result is that I’m going to have a lot of figures turning up next week. I can’t wait. I’ve also dug out all my old ToyBiz figures and want to set them up somewhere. I’m planning to have a bit of a house sort out next week and I’m hoping to find a clear shelf somewhere to put at least some of them out. When I first moved in here I had a plan to have a rotating display, but that never happened as that shelf became the space for my swordfighting medals.

Of course, there’s still a load of waves I didn’t get, plus a ton of movies figures that have just been released. I don’t think I’ll ever be current, even if I tried. Instead, I’ll be a few months behind picking up waves when they get discounted or just before they sell out. That’s easier said than done though. I’ve hesitated on a few things these past few months and missed out.

Still, I have a load of birthday figures coming and I can’t wait to add them to my growing collection.