Two years back I was sitting in my apartment alone and slowly going stir crazy with boredom. Then true insanity hit as one day my eyes rested on this small piece of plastic that’s been sitting on my desk for years.
.
I don’t know how it happened. It’s like I blinked and suddenly that one funko figure became an entire shelf, then a small bookcase and now, somehow, I ended up with a collection that can double as wallpaper that covers every inch and possibly half the passageway outside as well. Hell I even kept track of my “investment” watching the prices of some soar while others dropped like lead, it always gave me such a rush to order the new flavor of the month or go hunting through yard sales and clearances for hidden treasures.
.
That’s where I found it. Towering over everything else and dominating the table was an eighteen inch, green haired with a yellow toothed smile, was a MEGA pop Joker. You know how you never make a beeline to the thing you really want in a yard sale, dance around it a bit before off handedly asking about the thing so as to get a better deal? Yeah…. No, I practically threw my wallet at the guy to get it. Waved away the warning of “Don’t take him out of the box unless he’s the only figure in the room! Don’t leave him there with others like him.” As I rushed home to decide where to place him and if I needed to change the décor to highlight my new treasure.
.
I’ll be honest, as a collector I am a bit of a snob. Just a little, I do like nice things and when I see something going up in price or given “grail” status I start liking it more. Which is why my new treasure puzzled me, I couldn’t find it on the official app or any reference to it anywhere on-line. I took some pictures to ask on reddit but somehow messed up and they ended up blurry. Not a surprise since my phone was getting on and almost every recent funko picture I took turned out a bit blurry, like those old photos of something moving too fast for the camera to catch. Yeah, yeah, I know, my phone is a potato but whatever. After some research I came to the only possible conclusion. It’s a fake, it looked real and everything but was a knockoff to dupe idiots like me. After that I thought, whatever, he’s worthless, took him out of the box and placed him in the far corner of the room. He can be my clothes hanger or something.
.
From that day things started to change. The figures out of the boxes were toppled over or moved around, then there were figures I didn’t remember taking out of the box just standing there as if caught in the act. Sometimes I would eye the huge Joker and think he moved just a little closer when I wasn’t looking. All imagination of course, probably guilt about my own snobbery. So, from time to time, I’d give him a little head pat and assure him that it didn’t matter, he was still impressive and I was glad to have something so unique guarding my apartment.
.
More and more of my collection was out of box now, seems a shame to spend so much money on something and then not enjoy it but… I don’t remember taking some of these out. I discussed this with one of my co-workers when I noticed some older funkos decorating his desk. Then our talk went more in-depth into our hobby and I discovered he targeted the rare figures, the ones that went for hundreds and sometimes thousands. I had a few on the lower tier of rare so invited him over to show off my collection.
.
People think that if you own a lot of something you wouldn’t miss one or two. It’s actually the other way around, someone with four hundred figures is more likely to notice one of their carefully arranged collection pieces missing than someone that has four figures collecting dust in a corner unseen for years.
.
The Funkos descended on the thief with pins and needles, before I could even say or do anything the final blow was dealt and the Jokers frozen smile was splattered with blood.
.
I finally figured out what happened to that kitchen knife that went missing a few weeks back, the same day I had a change of heart and started complementing my new Funko guardian…