The X-Men Toys

For months, Doom DeLuise has been trying to get me to post again. And again. Finally, after he had gone through the blog to correct some transfer troubles, he said to me tonight that I knew too much about X-Men not to post. And it’s true. After a break-up in 2003, I went through and rediscovered the X-Men comics. I had started to read Grant Morrison again, but this jettisoned me into needing something to do, and X-Men comics seemed like the thing to do at the time.

In my hometown, we had a store, briefly open, called Smokey’s Cave. It was neither smokey nor cavernous. But it did have at least three years worth of the Claremont/Silvestri X-Men. Being the only customer (other than the “punk kids” from my school I dragged there to check out the records), these were at my disposal at every paycheck, and cheap to boot. We’re talking a dollar an issue cheap. I bought out what he had, and ran out of things to buy so I started the Ann Notcenti Daredevil, just to support this kindly old man, and my own comic habit. So now, I stand four years after this breakup, and seven years after Smokey’s Cave, and I have a bunch of X-Men comics to show for it, along with an obsessive back cataloged knowledge.

The Claremont/Silvestri run was the consummation of characters I had only read about. I had played as Dazzler in the X-Men arcade game, and knew of all the other members of the Australian team. Quite a few of these were through an X-Men board game with little figurines. In the early days of my comic collecting, circa 1993, the X-Men toys were first coming out. This meant that the characters I saw in the board game, and a few others I had only heard of in the Marvel Universe Series Three cards (which were the paramount of cool at the time) were coming out in figures.

But when you dig through the old toy box of your youth, you realize something – the X-Men figures, so cool at the time, kind of sucked. But you bought every damn one of them. Banshee, who I came along too late to read his actual exploits, was a figure I owned twice. In fact, it was after having owned the figure once that I finally was able to even put him in a place with Uncanny X-Men #304. This was the beginning of Fatal Attractions, and a four dollar issue. Luckily, my cousin had it, and she later gifted it to me. But there he was – Banshee. I owned this stupid whistle toy twice without knowing who he was, because he was THERE, on the shelves with Forge, eight editions of Cable and a Wolverine in Weapon X costume AND jumpsuit edition.

When you’re a late bloomer to superheroes, the rush of being nine and seeing all these heroes is sort of overwhelming. I wouldn’t have even started, had it not been for some cousins who liked the cartoon and had me watch it. But buying these toys made it seem even cooler – some tangible piece of the characters that fleshed them out even more. And I bought scads of these things – Cyclops in a space outfit, Cyclops in his old school outfit, a 12-inch Sabretooth, Wolverine in street garb, a back-flipping Beast, that damn flip action Forge figure, the Magneto with magnets on his hands, Rogue with uppercut action, etc.

But a few weeks ago, I got to looking back at all these old X-Men figures after a friend became re-obsessed with Transformers figures. We both looked back at how many we bought, and how many broke. We looked back on the bad execution and the fragile figures, Iceman figures with clear plastic and arms that fell off. If you stumble upon them now, they’re a relic of a pre-McFarlane toys age when they didn’t have to be a perfect sculpt, they could just reasonably be a turd of a toy. Because as a kid, you didn’t care.

You see a Marvel Legends figure now, and there’s a million points of articulation, a commercial artist and a big base accessory with it. But somehow, the spring loaded Gambit with kicking action seems like the salad days of it all. The excitement of a Legend figure is lost on the kids, and found only by the fan boys. But, as I look over them from time-to-time, they seem to be too durable. It’s not even like a discovery. There’s not leagues of the whole team out there, new cards and figures with them to continue the obsession. They’re better made, but there’s no excitement in seeing the back of the card to see who’s coming out next.

The X-Men toys, for better or worse, were a gateway (not Gateway, the aborigine) into this new world in the animated series, and the animated series would lead to the comics, and the comics would lead to obsession. Maybe it’s like Claremont’s books – we look back on it more fondly because of our youth. We remember Chris’ recent forays into re-writing the X-Men, and watching him flounder, because of the magic. Toys that fell apart didn’t seem like crappy designs back then. They seemed like everything back then. Now, there’s only a crappy broken Blackbird and a few fallen soldiers to show me what I had back then.

And I can remember the jealousy of seeing a Secret Wars Wolverine figure that my friend Ryan had when I went over to his house in fourth grade, or the original line Archangel that shot missiles, or the Cyclops in X-Factor outfit he brandished, knowing it was my favorite character and letting me play with it. Even though I spent my allowance on abysmal crap, it doesn’t seem like time or money wasted. It seems like my late childhood. The Secret Wars Wolverine was a four jointed monstrosity, but like Mego figures, its oldness made it in turns cooler.

There’s no modern significance to this post. There’s nothing particularly special about it. Instead, there’s a crappy Banshee with a plastic cape, the same material Gambit’s immovable trench coat was made from. There’s Cyclopses and Mr. Sinisters with dead batteries that don’t light up their eyes anymore. And there’s the same hindsight that makes you remember the X-Men that once were, and realize that it’s few steps removed from now. Comics, by and large, are pieces of what we hold onto from our youth, and what we can’t give up as the years go by.