This is something I have wanted to put together for a long time. I first started tossing the idea around sometime last year while I was cleaning out my basement and started uncovering a treasure trove of GI Joe toys. Toys I hadn’t handled or played with for a long time, but toys that had played a major role in my childhood and are even significant to me as an adult.
Growing up I was crazy about everything GI Joe, I collected the action figures and vehicles, comic books, books, cartoons, video games, and even random collectibles such as table clothes, birthday cards, and party hats.
Over the years I amassed an impressive collection that became even more so when I was an adult and had discovered the miracle technology called e-Bay. Even as an adult I was nuts about collecting, after all how many grown men do you know would cash in their 401k to buy a seven-foot long GI Joe Aircraft Carrier? Well, at least one now.
My collection has slowly dwindled over the past year as I have been selling off certain pieces of it in an effort to pay down some debt. I have mostly been getting rid of figures that I don’t have much use for in my Joe-universe, or ones that I have more than one version of. At one time I collected multiples of cobra figures, which is a term referred to as “Army Building”. I also owned at least two of every Joe team member; I had figures for display, and figures for play. I haven’t been able to display my collection in the last several years and decided that the duplicate figures were superfluous, so those were the first to go.
At one time I was also began buying huge lots of figures solely for their parts in an attempt to customize my own GI Joe figures creating new characters, and redesigning existing ones.
The customizing hobby lasted only a few years, but I created well over thirty figures in the process. I even discovered an online community of fellow customizers at www.joecustoms.com; a site I still visit every once in a while for nostalgia.
When it came to my collection I was never a “complete-ist”, and my figures did not remain sealed in their blister packs to one day sell for a massive profit. I collected the toys because I loved to play with them, and even at twenty-nine years old I can admit that at times I still do.
The whole point of this new blog is for me to share my love of GI Joe with anyone that is interested in it. I will review figures, vehicles, books and comics, share pictures of my collection, and custom figures. I will even post excerpts from my own live action GI Joe film script, and planned comic book series (both of those went out the window when Devils Due had purchased the rights to GI Joe comics, and a Sci-fi movie sharing the same name was recently in theatres).
I will update the blog as time allows. The difficult part will be deciding what aspect of my obsession to share with you first.
The first official entry titled "Ultimate Duke" is coming soon, I'm sure you can't wait.
