My Year With Marvel: Merchandise

I hate owning things. I’m not sentimental and I feel little to no collector’s instinct¹. I want stuff on my walls because the nicest house in the world looks like shit with bare walls, and I’ll concede the need for furniture and kitchen utensils and all that, but gods spare me from random crap.

Well, mostly.

Y’all may have noticed I like Marvel, and Marvel produces a lot of merchandise. They sell useful stuff like wallets and bedding and kitchenware, and they produce (admittedly cool-looking) clutter like foam Mjolnirs and lifesize Iron Man’s head night lights and fully-articulated Spider-Man figures with six different sets of hands.

Some of it’s pretty great, but I don’t need to own it because it ain’t practical. Maybe I could get some use out of a Thor pint glass, but what the hell am I gonna do with a foam Mjolnir? A Hawkeye wallet could be pretty sweet (especially if it features Kate Bishop instead of Clint Barton), but a foot-tall porcelain Deadpool statue would probably just scare me in the long term.

So I resist.

Or resisted, I should say, since I met Barnes & Noble's Funko Pop! department on my last trip to the States and, well, shit happened.

This is Tiny Deadpool. He’s four inches tall. His head bobbles. He’s got two tiny guns and a tiny katana.

He’s really frickin’ cute.

It would’ve been wrong to leave him in Barnes & Noble, seeing as how I had a gift card that covered most of his purchase price, so I decided to make an exception to the I Hate Owning Things rule.

And hey! He likes Mexican food! We have much in common, Tiny Deadpool and I.

I love him a lot.

Also, he’s promised not to terrify me at random intervals, as a foot-tall porcelain Deadpool statue might have done. Thanks, Tiny Deadpool!

This is Tiny Hawkguy. He’s four and a quarter inches tall on account of his hair. His head bobbles to a much greater extent than does Tiny Deadpool’s. He has a tiny bow and a tiny quiver strapped to his back and tiny, strappy boots.

I tried not to buy him because he’s Cinematic Hawkeye and Cinematic Hawkeye doesn't do a whole lot, but he does look remarkably like Comics Hawkguy and Comics Hawkguy is very important to me.

Comics Hawkguy is the sort of dude who tries to save a murderous ninja mere minutes after said murderous ninja did their level best to assassinate him, because hell if anybody’s gonna die on his watch. I think about that a lot.

So I let him follow me home.

Tiny Hawkguy and Tiny Deadpool have formed an uneasy alliance despite their differences. Awwwww.

I shall endeavor not to buy more adorable Marvel merchandise (see: no collector's instinct), but one never knows. If Funko comes out with Tiny Kate Bishop, Tiny Pizza Dog, or Tiny Nova, I may add a little more clutter to my life.

And to be perfectly honest, I was looking for a Tiny Dancing Groot when I found Tiny Deadpool, so... yeah.

Maybe my collectors' years aren't as far behind me as I thought.

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1. This wasn't always the case. I used to collect about a million different things, but somewhere along the line I decided I was no longer interested in amassing large quantities of impractical objects. I promptly rounded up my collectibles and sold 'em. I wrote a longish digression about that process when I first sat down to draft this post, but perhaps it belongs elsewhere. I'll trot it out the next time I put My Year With Marvel on hiatus for a week or two.