fantastic_four

I spent the holidays dreaming about building a Hot Toys armory of Iron Man figures, but how can the high-end figure market ever thrive with the glut of Chinese counterfeits that are flooding the market? American and Japanese figure makers are pushing quality in the figure market like never before, yet EVERY major premium figure they produce gets cheaply copied by people from China, and they're ALL getting hit by it including Hot Toys and the other Sideshow creators, Revoltech, Figma, Figuarts, etc etc. And this isn't rare, it's absolutely RAMPANT with the majority of higher-end figures being sold through eBay being counterfeit now. Yes, I know I can get originals straight from the manufacturer or trusted sellers like BigBadToyStore.com, but how can I justify paying maybe $500 for a figure that I can't re-sell for that much due to the confusion these counterfeits are causing in the market? I don't see how I can consistently spend more than $50 on these figures with the way that China lets its citizens violate international copyright and patent law.

Really loving this Golden Age of figures, and this week I picked up the very recent Playstation 4 Spider-Man figure pictured swinging below. I'm not necessarily a fan of the costume, but the articulation and molding detail on the figure is incredible, best I've seen on a Spidey and a slight upgrade to the mega-popular "pizza Spidey" figure from 2015, and the webs it comes with are really fun to pose with. Got tons of stuff still coming in this week including the new amazing Marvel Legends Thing, the entire first wave of retro Legends characters, last year's Legends Psylocke, Select Juggernaut, and the Revoltech Wolverine. Of those I'm looking forward to Revoltech Wolverine the most. Also found out yesterday that last year's Mr. Fantastic has metal wires in his arms so you can bend them and they will mostly stay bent that way, making his stretchy arms far cooler to manipulate than I originally thought. I've got him below trying to wrap up the Marvel Legends Juggernaut build-a-figure.

I'll bet that isn't true but that he's got nothing final to report publicly. He has to have already mentally penciled in how and far more importantly when he's going to fit them into the universe. Who knows what they'll do, but if I had to bet it would be a crossover film arc between Avengers and Fantastic Four featuring Galactus as the big bad with the entire universe coming together to fight him.

NO.

Even the sixth scale comic-styled premium figures aren't appealing to me. Below are the upcoming Sideshow Wolverine and Magneto figures...I'm not liking the look, at least yet. They lack the artistic flair guys like Byrne, McFarlane, Lee, or the cartoon animators taught me to love. They do look rather realistic, and I rationally believe I SHOULD appreciate that...yet, somehow, I don't. If you were going to actually create real versions of the comic costumes, they would probably look a lot like they do on these figures...but they're not translating to reality well for me.

At least for me, I don't get every figure in a line. That helps. You can pick the main Star Wars heroes. My plan is for Jedi Luke to be with the upcoming Hot Toys R2. Also, Endor Luke and hopefully Leia for either the Sideshow or possible Hot Toys Speederbike. I'll probably never get all of The Avengers either. I've settled into getting the best version of the characters I like, and then I'm done. I get why people want to get all of a particular line or size--it extends the hunting phase of collecting--but with eBay and enough money, hunting doesn't take all that long anyway. So far I'm finding that Marvel and Star Wars figures are in such demand that if you buy a quality one they're not hard to sell, so upgrading to a newer and better piece should be relatively simple. From there, it's now about setting up dioramas in my display cases. Right now I'm just posing them facing each other, but I want to find all the tools to make that far more dynamic--display stands, props, etc. I don't see myself going for the ultra-high end of Star Wars stuff from the 1970s even though that's when I started. I had pretty much everything they put out at the time while I was a kid, and the modern figures are SO much more detailed and better articulated that they're just not holding appeal for me now. That's mostly because I'm having a blast letting my son play with the figures I buy, and obviously that's not an option with something in a professional grader's case. That's the main thing that's got me thinking about selling my statues, too, the fact that you can't use them at all. Marvel's really good figures didn't start until the 1990s and I had the Mego Batman, Robin, Superman, and Spider-Man as a kid, so I've got little desire to chase the high end there, either. The Hot Toys-style figures aren't appealing to me. I don't want a Wolverine that looks like Hugh Jackman, I want one that looks like Wolverine from the comics. I've got the Revoltech Wolverine coming in a few days and I'm ultra-excited about it. Why don't you just check ebay sold listings for characters and sort it by highest price. At least that way you can see what figure of a character is popular and in demand. Sometimes that also equals the best figure of that character. That does seem like a great way to do it, thanks!

Picked up the Diamond Select Colossus. I've also got the Select Juggernaut pictured below coming in this week as well as the Legends Build-A-Figure Juggs coming in to see which of the two I like best. Love the Select Colossus with two reservations--he's not fully in scale with 6" Marvel Legends characters at 8" tall, and as is true with many Select characters the legs barely move forwards. Meh, neither issue is a big deal, it's no big thing that Colossus is 8 feet tall when next to Marvel Legends figures instead of the 7' 5" he's depicted as in the comics and also in both Deadpool movies, he's supposed to be huge so being slightly more huge is barely noticeable. Really good classic detailing on him, love it more than all the other versions I've seen.

That figure looks really dumb. THIS is a super-cool Venom figure.

Like this? This is from BBTS: An advantage of the one on Amazon is it comes with 5 stands, and you can configure the claw hooks in a variety of ways. Straight up is one option, but here are examples of others:

I had a Millenium Falcon, but it's the familiar story that my mom gave away all my Star Wars stuff while I was in college. I had most of the Star Wars toys from the 1970s and early 1980s, all gone! Death Star, Hoth set, Falcon, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Darth Vader figure carrying case, 3.75" and 12" figures, even the remote-controlled R2-D2 and a large Yoda rubber hand puppet.. She asked the friend she gave it to if she could have it all back since I later expressed an interest in it and since her friend's son is in his 30s, but her friend told her no because it's so valuable now.

That game has influenced a lot of my visual preferences for Marvel characters as well. I particularly love how massive Juggernaut is, the exaggeratedly-wide proportions from that game are my favorite for Juggs now. I really want the Marvel Select Juggernaut (at right in pic below) because he has those same proportions whereas the Marvel Legends Build-a-Figure Juggernaut (at left in pic below) is slightly more slender.

Do you guys know some good display stands, or guides for displaying figures on various surfaces? The best generic ones I'm aware of right now are these: https://www.amazon.com/MLST-A01C-multi-stand-clear-multiple/dp/B00UUTBFGY/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1545227099 But I'm also curious about techniques and tools for mounting them to vertical surfaces, hanging them from above, etc. I posed the five X-Men figures from the original X-Men set a while back in my display case, and for Angel I tied a copper wire around his waist and fed it down from the roof of the case so he appeared to be flying. But that was a huge pain to do, so I'm looking for easier ways to achieve similar results.

Got this on the way, it's from 2011. His eyes light up and he says 18 different things when you press the button on his chest, and he's 16" tall next to the 3.75" Wolverine in the pic below that comes with him. Probably also going to pick up the 2011 Marvel Legends Build-a-Figure version. There are four versions of this with the most recent coming out just this year, but I decided I liked this specific one from 2011 the best. The one from this year doesn't have light-up eyes and lacks multiple paint details, particularly silver paint on the wires running through the wrists and ankles. He looks more accurate to the comics with 1:18 3.75" figures as opposed to the 1:12 6" figures that dominate the modern market, but meh, should be fine. Wow, would I have killed for this stuff when I was 10. I remember playing with G.I. Joe figures and just pretending they were Marvel characters. I vividly recall imagining that Destro was Colossus because of the similar silver metal head and using one of the bulkier ones as Juggernaut because I liked imagining fights between those two.

I had no interest in this or Spider-Verse, but wow, looks like they're killing it on both of them. Very surprising.

Critics are gushing all over this film. Disney's REALLY gonna get bent over now when the time comes to buy Sony Pictures.

My kickoff into the figures I wished I had as a kid began this week. First up is Fantastic Four, and I picked up the figures below released this year. Still looking for the Thing after it just came out a few months ago at Walgreens only, but you can't find the friggin' thing anywhere. Next up will probably be the 2011 19" Galactus figure, followed by an X-Men lineup centered around the 2011 16" sentinel figure, one of two Juggernaut figures, and an assortment of X-Men I'm still deciding on.

Yea, but there's usually a small set of contenders for best, no more than 5 to 10 for even a character as popular as Batman or Spider-Man. Narrowing the field down to a small set is of tremendous use because it doesn't take long for most people to pick their favorite from a list of the best.

That's fine. But at any point in time it seems quite difficult to even find out what all the options are to begin to assess. Maybe price guides? Is there an equivalent with action figures to what Overstreet or GPA are to comics?

Why go through all that work? This is the Internet, so I feel fine letting everyone know that I've seen it 1,393,902,448 times. TOP THAT, SUCKAS!

I look at pics and say "Wow, that's really cool," too. Then four days later I see another version of that same character and think "Wow, that's even cooler!" A day later I'm not sure if I think the new one is cooler or the other one is, and I spend another three days mulling that over. Two weeks later I see yet another version that looks even cooler than the first two, and keeping track of everything starts to seem too overwhelming.

When I want a figure, I find myself instantly wanting opinions about what the best version of that figure is. What's the best way to figure that out? Even in a focused forum like the Fwoosh forum I would expect to see ongoing threads for the most popular characters like "Best Superman 1/6" or "Best Spider-Man 1/12", but I just don't see that. Google searches on "best <insert character name here> action figure" are helpful, but extremely incomplete with major versions of a figure just not showing up at all in a random search as I end up discovering weeks later. I could mention a character I'm interested in, but I won't because there are just too many. I want to know what the best Spider-Man is, the best Magneto, the best Batman, etc etc etc etc etc. So I could go and start three dozen topics titled "Best <insert character name here>," but that may be too much of a tax on readers so I won't. Yet. One thing that would be EXTREMELY useful in doing that kind of research is an exhaustive list of every version of a figure that has been released. Anyone seen such lists? If you take a character like Spider-Man there have probably been hundreds of versions. That's an intimidatingly large pool of figures to choose from, and becoming fully familiar with the available options would easily take YEARS without a dedicated resource.

Why, Netflix, would you give fans of the show this chance to hate you like this? However, in effect it probably doesn't matter since there were two-year gaps between the seasons of the show. We likely wouldn't have gotten another Netflix season until 2020 based upon the release schedule of prior seasons.

I definitely will. There's a thread on The Fwoosh that started in 2016 before the Revoltech Marvel figures came out that has continued to this day, so I'm pretty sure I'll be spending hours today and tomorrow reading that one. http://thefwoosh.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=96&amp;t=94757

I don't know why I would continue to collect statues given how good figures have gotten. Statues were cool at first because they were so big and detailed, but with figures getting more and more detailed over the past decade, they seem a LOT more fun than a static statue. Probably going to start a separate thread to discuss this exact idea sometime soon.

Great info, thanks! The Fwoosh does seems quite active with lots of posts just this morning across multiple topics. I was reading some long threads in the Sideshow Collectors (or is it Sideshow Freaks? That's the logo at the top) yesterday about deterioration of Hot Toys figures, so I noticed that's probably the best source for that specific line of figure.