Identity Crisis

As someone who was buying Stablemates from the get-go in 1975, I’ve generally been pretty nonpartisan on Stablemates releases – a nice release is a nice release, whether it’s a freshly minted newer mold or one of the original Hagen-Renaker G1s.

All that being said, the G1 Morgan Mare is probably one of my favorite G1 molds. (In fact, one of the few customs I had commissioned back in the day was on the Morgan Mare!) So I was pleased that they chose to use her again in the Stablemates Club this year, as Gwenevere:

The only thing I don’t like about this release is the twee, pretentious spelling of her name, which I assume was partially adopted to distinguish her from a previous release named Guinevere, on the Touch of Class mold.

And also because a lot of hobbyists get upset when they start recycling names? It’s not that big a deal for me: when you have a hundred or so different releases a year, you’re going end up with some duplicates. I’d rather they just duplicate a name they had before than go with an uncommon spelling that’s just going to confuse people even more.

A name is only part of an identity anyway: I know more than one person named Jennifer, and I can distinguish between them just fine.

On the topics of names and identities, I have to get the last bit of this business out of my system, once and for all.

I forged a significant part of my identity as a comic book enthusiast: conventions and comic book stores were not a welcoming place for girls, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. My experiences there taught me to not be so shy or ashamed of the things that I loved – whether it happened to be heroes, or horses.

Yet the world of comic books, like so many other intellectual properties or philosophical concepts, is highly partisan. People take sides: Coke vs. Pepsi, McDonald’s vs. Burger King, Star Trek vs. Star Wars, Republican vs. Democrat, New England Patriots vs. Anyone Else.

Some people cross over from time to time, or are ideologically neutral on one topic or another. (In the battle between Star Trek and Star Wars, I take no sides!) But most do pick a side, consciously or not.

Some time in the early 1970s, I consciously chose DC over Marvel. I’m not sure why I did so, though looking back now, I guess it was because at that time their female characters were more interesting and more powerful, and less prone to be depowered or trivialized.

(Above: Legion of Super-Heroes #2, March 1973, one of the first comic books I bought with my own money!)

By choosing to honor Marvel with five of the seven ticket Special Runs – six of the eight, if you include the Early Bird Special Cap – Reeves has clearly chosen a side, intentionally or not. As someone who has been a DC fan since before I bought my first Breyer, I now find myself somewhat less enthused about BreyerFest than I anticipated.

They’ve taken the easy and clichéd route many times before with BreyerFest themes, and given their proclivity for Disney-themed everything, I knew the catnip of Super-heroes + Disney was going to be too hard for Reeves to resist.

Yet they have a mold named Flash, a mold named Harley, and there’s a well-known independent published named Dark Horse, so I had hopes they’d offer a little bit more balance than the one token non-Marvel that they’ve given us. We still don’t know the names of some of the other prizes, the Pop-Up Store items or the One-Day Stablemates, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

I know these are only names, and not necessarily the identities that they will retain once I purchase any of them. Nevertheless, their release names are going to be a reminder that the feeling of being a stranger in a strange land will never leave me, even in the most familiar of surroundings.

So anyway, that’s the last gasp of griping about the subject from me. (No guarantees on the Star Wars stuff. Off to watch the new Episode IX trailer for the umpteenth time!)