F For Fake

Sure thing, happy to help! Yeah, the Fwoosh is a very active board, lots of posts every day. And yes, the other forum is called Sideshow Freaks but I think the actual URL is sideshowcollectors.com so that is how I think of it in my mind. But it is a TREMENDOUS resource for info on Hot Toys, Sideshow, and pretty much any other figure line. Like I said, they'll have a dedicated thread for every figure HT and SST (and NECA and etc) make, and it'll run for pages and pages. Sometimes you have to wade through some inane chatter, but there's tons of good info there. Have fun!

I did a lot more selling than buying this year (trying to whittle the collection down), and what I bought tended to be low grade. So, nothing fancy this year, but here are my faves.

Thanks! I'll try to keep 'em coming!

For a catch-all forum for several types of action figures, I'm partial to http://thefwoosh.com/ Which has dedicated forums for several different brands and lines and http://www.sideshowcollectors.com/forums/content/ Which is ostensibly dedicated to Sideshow collectors (duh) but has forums and threads for just about every kind of figure out there. For specific lines, I like http://www.hisstank.com/forum/ Hiss Tank for Joes and http://www.tfw2005.com/boards/ TFW2005 for Transformers But yeah, for your Hot Toys questions, definitely hit up the Sideshow Collectors forum. There are threads dedicated to every figure they've ever released. Edit to add: and as for your eBay searches, it may help a bit to limit your searches, excluding China and Japan, as most of the items offered from those countries are bootlegs. I hate to generalize and don't want to sound xenophobic, but that's just the sad truth about toys these days. Since I'm in the US, I limit my searches to "US Only" and that tends to cut most of the bootlegs out. YMMV.

LOVE the Relic! The 90's was a fallow period for horror, but this is definitely one of the better dumb monster movies to make it out of that decade. Plus Penelope Ann Miller when she was cute, and Tom Sizemore before he lost his mind.

And FINALLY, I know I mentioned a couple of months ago that I was picking up a collection of G1 TF's from a good friend of mine, as I'm helping him sell his collection of stuff. I'm just about done selling the comics for him, so now I'm finally digging into the Transformers. Lots of goodies hiding in these piles. It's a real hodgepodge; many of the first wave cars are broken or have missing parts, but he also has several near complete pieces in nice shape, including many missiles and weapons never removed from their sprues. There are also some random gems like a Bumblejumper in nice shape. Lots to go through. I'll come back with more pics later once I've cleaned them up and sorted everything out, probably during my Christmas vacation.

Also picked these up yesterday. The Vintage wave of rereleases at WalMart have been ghosts around here, except for Hot Rod, which you can find in piles. I hadn't bit the bullet yet because they don't seem to be going anywhere, but WM marked them down to $15, so I had to go ahead and pick up a couple of them. Will probably open up the "backwards" package and keep the other one sealed up just because it's so purty.

So, my Target Mego haul came in yesterday, and man, it was nuts. I had six ENORMOUS boxes on the porch that could have been safely condenses down into one or two, but hey, kudos to Target for packing the stuff carefully. It was definitely overkill (nearly each figure in its own small box, shipped inside of a larger box) but I won't complain, considering the way some people pack stuff. :cough: Amazon :cough: Anyway, I may have gone a little overboard, but the B2G1 sale plus the sudden availability of figures I hadn't seen at all lead to some frenzied buying. I think these are noticeably improving with every wave. The Romulan, for instance, is just a gorgeous toy.

It seems to be hit or miss and somewhat dependent on the climate that the figure is stored in. There are many instances not only of the cracking you show here, but also of the rubber "weeping", or "leaking" something like oil. Whatever oil they were making the rubber suits out of, it can break down and start leaking. If you search for "Hot Toys rubber deterioriating" or "weeping" or "leaking", you should get lots of hits on message boards and youtube and stuff. Lots of examples floating around out there, unfortunately. Basically any of the figures that are covered in rubber, have "seamless" joints, etc can be subject to both the cracking (especially if they're kept in an "extreme" pose for an extended time) and the rubber deteriorating. There are many instances of this happening, I know that a lot of folks had issues with the Alien figures (Big Chap, Kane and Dallas) with the rubber issue, and Sarah Conner had a lot of issues with the cracking elbows. Then again some folks had the same figures and never saw a bit of trouble. So it's hit or miss, but definitely something to keep in mind before laying out a lot of cash for them.

That's certainly true, but this particular breed of run collector that I see these days doesn't seem to be looking to sell, nor are they concerned about condition. They just want cheap runs of characters they like. I'm 100% sure you're right and there are many exceptions, but I'm just speaking about what I've seen locally.

Ha, that's funny, I'm also sitting on a cache of both Long Bow Hunters AND Hawkworld. However, I also really dig those books, so I don't mind. If Cosmic Odyssey ever hits, my ship will truly have come in.

Screw comics, I'm getting into the cardboard business!

Yeah, Prestige Format used to mean just that: prestige. If a book was coming out in PF, it was special. Now I have boxes full of Batman PF's that I picked up for 50 cents. The good thing about PF's, though, is they are usually in nice shape!

It's a figure with a display. I think Phicen makes them...or TBLeague or whatever they call themselves these days. I've been on the fence about Phicen's stuff for a long time. The seamless bodies look great, but I worry that they'll degrade over time, like the rubber on some of the Hot Toys stuff.

Yes, totally agree, if I was a SW collector, I'd be all over that stuff.

yeah, even I have to admit that is pretty snazzy, and certainly better articulated than the recent Marvel Legends figure!

Yeah, Sideshow is a distributor for Hot Toys and many others, but they also do their own in-house stuff, like these Marvel figures. I like the IDEA of a lot of their figures more than the execution. Something about the face sculpts usually seems "off" to me. But all in all I definitely prefer the character/costume selection to the movie-inspired Hot Toys stuff, for sure.

Yeah, those extreme designs are a turn off for me, and not a Jim Lee fan either, for the most part. I'm boring, I like my toys to look like the comics I grew up with. The Revoltech looks a little too anime inspired for my tastes. Just not my thing. Luckily, there's no shortage of Batman figures out there to choose from!

Some of my favorite books ever! I need to get my Primer slabbed, I think it's about a 9.4 but it may be better. 9.6 is awesome, that book is tough. Congrats!

Great books! I remember buying a copy of UXM 130 at a comic show at a local shopping mall. Those were always a lot of fun. I believe I paid $7 for it, and that seemed to me to be an INSANE amount of money for a comic book. But I was on my way to "collecting", and I knew it was a first appearance of a character I liked, so I splurged. I think it was around that same time that I paid $8 or so for UXM 137, Death of Phoenix. And 113 is one of the best covers in the run, and a great read too!

I think it ultimately all comes down to price. Every show I go to, I'll see a bunch of folks congregating around the 50 cent, dollar and $5-under bins with lists, notebooks, spreadsheets on their phones, etc, trying to fill in their runs. They just don't want to spend a lot doing it. I think the interest is out there, the market just has to meet it.

I was an early adopter of Hot Toys, but have sold nearly all of the figures I've owned over the years. Once the secondary market prices start to pop, I end up finding an excuse to sell. I've only got a handful of them now, and they are gorgeous, but once again I have to balk at the rising prices. A standard figure with nearly zero accessories is what, $250 these days? Just seems like insanity. Also, they seem to only be interested in cranking out figures from the Marvel movies, and while I enjoy the Marvel movies well enough, I'm generally not a enough of a fan of the costume designs that I'd want to own figures of them. I don't buy the Marvel Legends MCU figures for the same reason. It looks fine on screen, but in a toy, I'm just not interested. If HT got back to doing a wider variety of licenses, I'd be onboard. As for Revoltech, I have been curious but I generally don't like the designs they base the figures on. For the price, I'll stick with my $20 Marvel Legends, which are increasingly looking like a great deal.

This. If nothing else, surely you can shave that extra $200 off.

Damn, sold mine back when he didn't show up in Infinity War. Just seemed too shaky to me. I made good money on them, but I could have made better money! Oh well, can't win 'em all.

If condition is as advertised, and you're buying for yourself, then yes, I'd say it's a good deal. As @RCheli pointed out, in nice shape, you get your money's worth with about 10 issues (I'd throw 129, 130 and 137 into the ring alongside the picks above as keys), There are still several books in the Cockrum and Byrne run that are solid $30-$50 books in grade. and there are plenty of $15-$20 books in the later books as well, like 201, Mutant Massacre, 221, 244, 248, 268, 282, K14 etc. So if I was looking to pick up a nice X-Men run in one swoop, you could certainly do much worse. If you're buying for resale, then I'd think there's still some meat on the bone for sure, but yeah, you're going to have to blow out about half of them for next to nothing, and the grading needs to be on point. X-men certainly aren't hard to find, but locally at least I've seen an uptick in interest of late. But it really comes down to how nice the GSX1 and 94 are/aren't.