Toy Bender

So you’ve probably figured out by now that I’m giving this Poe Ghostal guy a chance in the high stakes world of internet blogging. Sure, I could crush him like a bug like many others before him, but for some reason there’s something that keeps me from smiting him. I guess you could say I’m like Q and he’s like Picard… if you’re a huge geek.

After Poe interviewed me, I thought I’d return the favor. About a month and a half later I finally got around to sending him questions. Here is the result of that epic exchange:

ToyBender: When did you start collecting toys?

Poe: Well, I started playing with toys–or more specifically, toys that could be classified as “action figures”–around age four. My first toy was a little Mighty Mouse figure. I “played” with toys up through my Ninja Turtles fad. After that, I suppose I became a “collector.” When I was about fourteen I bought a lot of old Transformers toys, including my first-ever Internet purchase (a used Swoop, found on the classified ads of Prodigy, back in the days before eBay).

But it wasn’t until I got to college that toy collecting became an obsession for me. It’s only grown since then.

ToyBender: What’s your favorite toy line of all time?

Poe: Oh…tough pick, but I’ll have to go with G1 Transformers. Grimlock remains my favorite toy of all time, and all the Dinobots–plus Optimus Prime and Megatron–hold a special spot in my toy shrine.

Honorable mentions include the original Masters of the Universe figures, the original TMNT toys, and the current DC Superheroes/Universe Classics line, which I think has a chance to be one the best action figure lines of the decade.

ToyBender: What do you collect now?

Poe: DC Universe Classics is my primary line right now, but I collect many other toys, including Alien vs. Predator, Buffy/Angel, Legendary Comic Book Heroes, and any and all Hellboy figures. A couple of years ago I collected every unique (non-variant) figure in the revamped Masters of the Universe line.

I also love all sorts of random figures, such as monsters, vinyl toys, and odds and ends like Clubber Lang from Jakks’ Rocky Line and Cleatus the Fox Sports Robot.

ToyBender: What do your friends and family think about your toy collecting habits?

Poe: Most of them are cool with it. My parents were always happy to buy me action figures, since they were a lot cheaper than, say, a videogame or a dirt bike. My cousin Mike and I grew up playing at each other’s houses, which culminated one Halloween night in 1992 in an epic battle titled “The Trick-or-Treaters vs. the Transformers”–the last official time I “played” with toys. (Officially.) I still remember a lot about that battle–there was a bloodthirsty Optimus Prime who tried to kill everyone, plus two Megatrons who argued with one another and an insane Luke Skywalker who spray-painted “Louk Roolz” wherever he could. The battle ended when Cadet Stimpy shot Optimus with his exposed brain. Yeah, we were weird.

My fiancee finds the whole toy thing cute, and she’s even agreed to have action figure-themed centerpieces at our wedding reception.

ToyBender: Do you consider yourself a nerd or a geek? If you aren’t either, then just what in the hell is a first down?

Poe: I consider myself a geek. Nerds are good at math. However, I do understand the mystery of the first down…which I learned at the age of twenty-three.

ToyBender: How did you get into writing for Toyfare?

Poe: Professional jealousy. I noticed the owner of a popular toy-themed website was writing for the magazine and thought to myself, “If he can do it, then so can I!” I contacted the magazine and wrangled myself a few gigs. It can be a lot of work, but a lot of fun, too.

ToyBender: What’s your favorite ToyFare article that you’ve written?

Poe: That has to be “Halo, Goodbye” in issue #123. It was a big feature article and it was great of the ToyFare editorial staff to give me the opportunity to write it. I got to interview Todd McFarlane for that one, plus talk with some of the folks from Bungie Studios.

I’m also very fond of my fake news article “Home Invasion” in issue #110 (which was mistakenly attributed to another writer). The article relates a story about a Sims Online town that’s decimated when an army of orcs strays from “a nearby World of Warcraft server.”

ToyBender: What other publications or websites do you write for (or have written for) aside from Poe Ghostal’s POA?

Poe: I haven’t written professionally for any other publications (meaning, I haven’t been paid for it). But I did have a column for a few months on the short-lived “Toys” section of the equally short-lived “IGN Scifi” section of IGN.com. I’ve also written dozens of action figure reviews for websites like OAFE and Michael Crawford’s Review of the Week.

ToyBender: Is writing your full time job or do you have a “real” job? If you have a “real” job, is yours as soul destroying as mine? Because I want to die every weekday morning I wake up.

Poe: I work in the library of a small arts college in Boston. I love my job. But I did the soul-destroying thing from the moment I graduated college until the day I got my current job, so I know where you’re coming from.

That said, none of the temp jobs I’ve had in the last decade compare to working the cash register at Wal-Mart the summer after I graduated high school. You haven’t lived until you’ve been harangued by an old man with rancid cigarette breath telling you you’re the worst cashier ever for charging him for four individual bottles of motor oil rather than the cheaper price of the four-pack that’s apparently sold out, though he neglected to tell you anything about that while you were ringing them up.

I don’t really make much off the writing–at least, not yet. But it does make me happy.

ToyBender: What got you to start your own toy blog? Was it jealousy? You can answer jealousy, nobody here will judge you…

Poe: Well, I’d been writing reviews for OAFE for years, but eventually it became clear that the site’s owner and I had a lot of different ideas about what directions we wanted to take the site in. At one point, another OAFE member and I had briefly a side project called “The Toy Pirate” which died of neglect.

In the meantime, I was still working on my plan to become a famous author, so I started up my own blog at www.biggerboat.net as a marketing tool for my nonexistent writing career. When it became clear I was more interested in writing about toys than writing fiction, I decided to try a new toy blog, and the rest is history.

Plus I was jealous of you.

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Ahh hah, there we have it! Still…. he did not divulge the secrets of the First Down. This Poe Ghostal is a tricky one. Perhaps I have underestimated him.

Other Interviews: An Interview with a real G.I. Joe