The Collecting Years
circa 1995–2002
It started with a magazine at Bosse’s Newsstand.
Bosse’s was the largest newsstand in Wisconsin — maybe the largest between Chicago and Minneapolis. A Green Bay institution, packed floor to ceiling with publications you couldn’t find anywhere else in the state. Thousands of titles — international newspapers, niche hobby magazines, literary journals, trade publications, things you didn’t know existed until you saw them on the rack. The cigar counter filled the air with tobacco smoke that mixed with the smell of fresh ink on newsprint. It always smelled amazing. Bosse’s was the kind of place that made a small city feel connected to the wider world. If it was printed and it mattered to someone somewhere, Bosse’s carried it.
I was twenty or so, killing time, and I saw it on the rack: the technical plans of the Rebel ships and the Millennium Falcon on the cover. Lucasfilm Magazine. I picked it up and something that had been dormant since I was twelve woke up all at once.
I don’t know why this was the trigger. I’d played the Super Nintendo Star Wars games. I’d played the Star Wars RPG by West End Games with Kory in high school. None of that flipped the switch. But this magazine — the cross-sections, the blueprints, the obsessive detail of a thing built by people who cared as much as I did — that did it. The Star Wars bug from my childhood bit me and everything came rushing back.
I had money. Not a lot, but I was working at the factory and $8 an hour was more than I’d ever made. My expenses were low. My first purchase was a Micro Machines Millennium Falcon — there wasn’t much to buy yet. Star Wars had been essentially dead as a commercial property for nearly a decade. The last film was Return of the Jedi in 1983. Kenner’s original toy line — the one every kid my age grew up with, the 3¾-inch figures and the AT-AT and the Millennium Falcon playset — ended production in 1985. For almost ten years after that, nothing. No movies, no toys, no merchandise on the shelves. The franchise survived only in the memories of people my age, in the West End Games sourcebooks a handful of us played in basements, and in Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy, which had quietly brought Star Wars back to the bestseller lists in the early ’90s and proved there was still a hunger out there.
But something bigger was stirring. Dark Horse Comics was publishing new Star Wars series — Dark Empire, Tales of the Jedi — filling in the gaps Lucasfilm had left empty. LucasArts was making PC games — X-Wing, TIE Fighter, Dark Forces — that were pulling a generation of fans back into the cockpit. Galoob’s Micro Machines were expanding into Star Wars ships. The infrastructure of a full-scale revival was being assembled piece by piece, and the magazine in my hands was proof that Lucasfilm knew exactly what they were building toward.
I subscribed, and that was the clincher. It connected me to all the other fans. We seemed scattered and few — not yet a movement, just isolated people in small towns who remembered the same thing. I bought back issues, catching up on ten years I’d missed. I brought out all my old toys — what was left of them. Some had lingered in boxes at my parents’ house. I wish I’d had all of them, and in good condition, but my parents had gotten rid of most. That’s what parents did in the ’80s. They didn’t know those Kenner figures would be worth fifty, a hundred, sometimes thousands of dollars someday.
And then came the other magazines. Back to Bosse’s, always back to Bosse’s. I picked up Lee’s Action Figure News and Toy Review — the bible of the action figure market, with price guides and collecting news and reviews of every new line hitting shelves. And Scrye, which covered the collectible card game explosion that was happening alongside the toy boom — Magic: The Gathering, Star Wars CCG, all of it catalogued and priced and analyzed like they were securities on an exchange. These magazines were my education. Before the internet made everything instantly knowable, this was how you learned what things were worth, what was coming next, what was rare. I’d stand in Bosse’s flipping through the new issues, cross-referencing what I had against what I needed, building a map of the collecting world from printed pages.
I’d look at vintage figure prices in the magazine and at antique shops. Some were thirty dollars. Some were a hundred. A carded Boba Fett could run three hundred. I couldn’t afford them yet. But I’d buy one here, one there, and the collection started to build. More merchandise came. Then the magazine rebranded — Lucasfilm Magazine became the Star Wars Fan Club. That told me everything. Lucasfilm knew what was coming. They renamed their publication after their biggest property by far. Hasbro had acquired Kenner and was preparing to relaunch the action figure line for the first time in a decade. Rumors of a prequel trilogy were solidifying into certainty. I was already caught up in the wave before it crested, and I was alone in my excitement except for the magazine connecting me to thousands of strangers who felt the same way.
I wasn’t entirely alone. There was Fortress Games.
Fortress was in a strip mall on University Ave — the kind of place you’d drive past a hundred times without noticing unless you were the kind of person who needed it, and then it was the center of your world. I stopped there almost every day after work to look, talk, or buy. Jon, the portly owner, would be behind his counter painting war miniatures like he never moved from the seat. His son Ian seemed to live there too — this kid growing up surrounded by nerdy adults, probably smarter than most of them, soaking in everything. I thought what a cool life for a kid, getting to hang out in a game store all day. Gaming nerds are a certain type, and Jon and Ian were the gaming nerd celebrities of Green Bay.
This is where I got into the Star Wars RPG by West End Games heavy — not the casual sessions I’d played in high school with Kory, but deep, sustained campaign play. I painted miniatures, and Jon would special-order them just for me. Of course he loved hooking me up — that’s what good game store owners do. They’re dealers in a very specific kind of joy. I asked him to arrange for someone to DM a Star Wars RPG campaign in his back room, and he did, and we played. I still think of Jon and Fortress Games every time I drive past that spot on University Ave. It’s a Mexican restaurant now. The strip mall doesn’t know what it lost.
Then, in 1997, everything exploded. Lucas released the Special Editions — the original trilogy remastered and back in theaters for the first time since the early ’80s. Suddenly Star Wars wasn’t a nostalgia trip for thirty-year-olds. It was a cultural event again. Lines around the block. Kids who’d never seen the films discovering them on the big screen. And with the Special Editions came the merchandise flood — Hasbro’s new Power of the Force figures hit the shelves, bulkier and more muscular than the old Kenner ones, and collectors lost their minds. The Phantom Menace was announced for 1999. The machine was fully operational.
Then the toy store opened.
I’d left the factory, done a short stint at a lawn company, traveled some, and come back. I saw an ad in the newspaper for a new toy store opening in the East Town Mall. I didn’t connect my growing obsession to the job — to me it was just an interesting position. I applied and got in. I was naive. I didn’t realize they’d overhired and would cut half the staff before opening. It was a trial. Good thing I worked hard. I just wanted to be the best sales rep and stocker there was. I ran to exceed customer expectations. I built bikes. I became an expert on toys — not just Star Wars, all of it.
My coworkers were all geeks like me. We talked Star Wars and toys constantly, feeding each other’s obsessions, debating theories about the prequels, comparing collections. We became experts together. It was the closest thing to a fellowship I’d had since high school. This was the golden age of action figure collecting — McFarlane Toys was reinventing what a figure could look like with Spawn, pushing the sculpting and detail far beyond what Kenner or Hasbro had ever attempted. Every franchise was competing for shelf space. And Lego was in the middle of its own renaissance, launching the Star Wars license in 1999 with sets that made adult collectors realize building blocks weren’t just for kids anymore.
What I didn’t realize was that store openings were a big deal. Especially toy stores, in the middle of the biggest toy crazes of the decade. Collectors knew that a fresh store meant full stock — even the rare figures, the short-packed variants that stores like Walmart and Target might get three of per case. On opening day, there was a mass of people waiting outside. Mario, Spider-Man, and Barbie were there in costume. The gate started to slide up and a guy crawled under it before it was fully open and caused a stampede. More people crawled under. Then more. They sprinted to their sections — the action figure aisle, mostly, and mostly the Power of the Force figures. But there were Marvel collectors, WildC.A.T.S. collectors, Batman, Todd McFarlane’s Spawn figures, Hot Wheels — I didn’t even know Hot Wheels collecting was a thing until that morning, but the die-cast car community was enormous and obsessive in its own quiet way. Lego collectors. Every hobby had its obsessives and they were all here at seven in the morning diving under a half-open gate.
I was naive enough that I hadn’t saved any figures for myself. No problem — I was an employee. I’d catch up. And I did. Over the next year I became a full collector. I went to every store. I asked staff to check the back for whatever figure I was hunting. I knew where to look, how to dig, which stores restocked on which days. There were events — Midnight Madness for the Phantom Menace toy launch in May 1999, when stores across the country opened at midnight to release the Episode I merchandise and the lines went around the building. I bought, sold extras, traded. I got extra income from selling rares at a markup — figures I’d paid store price for that were worth three or four times that to someone who couldn’t find them. Short-packed figures like the Expanded Universe Kyle Katarn or Mara Jade were gold.
Then there was eBay.
eBay launched in ‘95 but by ‘98 or ‘99 it had become the central nervous system of the entire collecting world. Suddenly every collector in the country was connected. You could find anything. You could sell anything. The prices were wild — people paying fifty dollars for a figure that retailed for six, because they couldn’t find it in their town and eBay was the only option. I had a room in my house dedicated to all of it — some opened, some still in boxes, shelves and bins and display cases full of plastic and cardboard. I’m embarrassed by this now. Not by the love of it — the love was real — but by the volume. The sheer accumulation. I was filling a void with objects and I didn’t know it yet.
I sold my Black-bordered Black Lotus — Magic: The Gathering, the most valuable card in the game — for one box of Star Wars CCG cards. I kick myself for this regularly. That Black Lotus would be worth somewhere north of a hundred thousand now. But I had faith that the Star Wars Customizable Card Game by Decipher would be something special. It wasn’t that special. The mechanics were too narrow — deploy this character to this system with this starship in play, and hope your opponent doesn’t have the one card that cancels it. Too many specific scenarios you had to engineer. It was mostly fun to read the lore and the quotes printed on the cards, little fragments of the movies and the expanded universe that made each card feel like a tiny artifact. The collecting was better than the playing. That should have told me something about myself.
The collecting continued after I left the toy store — through Humana, through the early years of school, through marriage and kids and all the rest. It built and built until it filled rooms and closets and a basement. It was a kingdom of plastic and nostalgia and the feeling of finding the thing you’ve been hunting for.
And then I sold it all. The Legos went for five thousand. The rest went in waves — eBay auctions, Craigslist listings, boxes hauled to resale shops. I let it go piece by piece, and each piece that left was a small grief and a small relief at the same time. I was becoming someone who didn’t need a room full of toys to feel whole. But I missed it. I still miss it sometimes — not the objects, but the hunt. The feeling of walking into a store and knowing exactly what you’re looking for and finding it on the shelf like it was waiting for you.
That kid at Bosse’s Newsstand, holding the Millennium Falcon blueprints, had no idea what he was starting.