Sunday, December 28, 2014

Monocle

The past couple of days have been quite annoying; two issues I thought were resolved apparently are not. There goes most of my finer plans for Monday …

In the meantime I’ve keeping busy taking care of the horsey paperwork; I've done so much buying and selling in the past two months that I’m not sure who stayed and who went. One of the few things that did manage to stick around after my collection buying-and-selling spree: a Gloss Three-Eyed (aka "Monocle") Misty!


The funny thing was that when I first saw her, I thought that she’d be the quickest way for me to recoup my investment in that collection. Then I went to look at my Misty lineup and realized she’s one of the few that I didn't have.

In my defense, there are a lot of distinct production Variations of the Regular Run Misty to keep track of, possibly more than any other individual Regular Run item. The only other ones that had about as much internal variation were some of the Dapple Grays, like the Proud Arabians and the #85 Azteca.

The Gloss Three-eyed Misty is one of the scarcer Misty Variations. Not as scarce as the Chalky, or the hand-airbrushed ones, but tougher than the Gloss 4-eyed one that most collectors consider the apex of collectible Misties.

The price I paid for this one wasn’t too bad - once I sold off everyone else in that collection. (Nice stuff, but nothing I really needed.)

Like the Stretched Morgan and the Running Stallion, Misty isn’t a mold I intended to collect: it chose me. I haven’t gone out of the way to find any of them, I just happened to stumble upon them during my normal search-and-rescue operations, either individually or in collections.

If I’m remembering correctly, it took me a few years before I finally got around to acquiring a regular, run-of-the-mill Misty, too. It’s not that I wasn’t interested, I just figured that she wasn’t going anywhere for a while. Correctly: the original #20 release of the Misty ran for over 30 years - from 1972 through 2006 - and in several different rereleases and sets afterwards.

So it’s no surprise at all that she comes in so many lovely production variations.

It’ll be interesting to see how closely the Gloss Bay Pinto Vintage Club Misty hews to (what I’m presuming will be) the 4-eyed pattern.