Hello friend!

We moved houses recently. We were at our old place from May 2015 onward, and during that time we accumulated all the things you’re supposed to accumulate: memories, familiar haunts, friendships with great neighbours. We also accumulated an alarming amount of stuff.

This should surprise exactly nobody.

I’m a collector by nature, and I suspect growing up with not a lot of extras only made me more of a packrat. If I had to describe myself as any kind of collector, comic books would probably be the headliner. My greatest collecting achievement, for lack of a better word, was maintaining an unbroken collection of every Superman comic from 1986 to 2020, when I finally and painfully ended the one-sided contract I had apparently signed with no one.

But comics were only part of it.

For years I collected autographed photos, and baseball cards. I also kept virtually all my old toys, perhaps because we had so few growing up. Then, in my twenties, I worked at a comic store, which turned out to be bad news for my collecting habits. Between the staff discount and the strange peer pressure that develops within collecting communities, my collecting picked up considerably. It’s a bizarre phenomenon, but when you watch friends and customers enthusiastically scooping up every DC Universe Classics figure they can find, their enthusiasm becomes contagious. Before long, you start worrying that if you don’t buy that B’wana Beast now, you’ll never get another chance.

Logically, getting married should have curbed some of this. Certainly my wife would have been perfectly happy with me leaving large chunks of my collection in the past. Instead, we had kids, and having kids only accelerated my collecting because I suddenly had a built-in excuse. These weren’t for me. They were for the kids.

Action figures? For the kids. 4 ft tall Batcave playset? For the kids. Care Bears? Believe it or not, also for the kids.

To be fair, many happy Christmas mornings and birthdays proved there was at least some truth to that claim. While my wife has remained mostly immune to the collecting bug, I’d wager even she remembers fondly driving to every McDonald’s in town trying to determine which Happy Meals contained which Beanie Boos so our kids could complete a set. I also couldn’t help noticing a conspicuous absence of her Barbies and My Little Ponies at our recent garage sale.

Still, as our oldest children entered their teen years, action figures and stuffies became harder to defend purchasing.

As we prepared for our move, I spent a lot of time sorting through old boxes in my dank, dark studio space, deciding what could be donated, recycled, chucked, or sold. What surprised me was how often I’d discover mint-in-box toys that I had absolutely no recollection of owning.

If you had asked me whether I owned a Mach 5 from Speed Racer, I would have confidently testified that I did not. Then I’d open a tote and immediately perjure myself. Go, Speed, go!

After enough of those discoveries, I found myself confronting a difficult question. If you have something in a box, and it’s so forgotten that you genuinely don’t realize it’s there, do you really have it?

And if the answer is no, couldn’t you stand to sell it?

After years of being a reliable buyer at shows, shops, and online marketplaces, those questions became the impetus to open the vault and become a seller instead.

As comfortable as I was with thinning out my own possessions, it was much harder watching my children make the same mature decision, decades before me. Long-beloved dolls, action figures, and, for some reason hardest of all, Care Bears were up for grabs. Selling them was their choice, and I didn’t want to undermine it, but it made me miss those earlier days where there was no better surprise than a Braveheart Lion1.

But it does no good to hold onto so much stuff simply because of the memory attached, because where does it end? Part of me wants to keep every scrap of paper my kids ever drew on—but if I did that, I’d end up in a documentary on TLC or something.

The garage sale itself was probably poorly timed, overlapping far too much with the actual move, but it demonstrated almost immediately that we’d made the right decision. What I hadn’t accounted for was the joy our collection would bring to the people buying it.

Certainly there was the usual stampede of fellow collectors at the start of the sale, some of whom will almost certainly mercenarily resell my treasures for profit rather than love.

That’s the nature of the beast. But there were also moments that made it apparent these things were headed exactly where they were supposed to go.

We watched a little girl in a car seat hug a Disney Store Alice in Wonderland doll and make it wave goodbye to us as they pulled away.

The same Elsa castle that made my daughters’ Christmas in 2016 made a Confederation-area granddaughter jump for joy when I delivered it in 2026.

Just like in Toy Story 3, piece by piece, the collection was making new memories somewhere else.

I talk about this with a good friend of mine, and fellow collector all the time. I’m nostalgic by nature. Probably too much Wonder Years at a formative age. Letting go of places and people that came before has never come easily to me.

But my friend points out that it’s not really the stuff I’m hanging onto. It’s the way the stuff made us feel: Safe, seen, known, cared for. And he’s right. It’s no longer the duty of an action punch Superman figure from Pinder’s Drug Store to fill me with those feelings. That job was completed years ago. But it’s a great blessing if that same figure2 can make a different little kid feel that way.

And, because this is an art blog, and I can’t stop talking about them (or apparently ever stop posting about them) here’s a Care Bears related drawing, of the villainous Shreeky, all grown up. If any Hollywood types are reading (and I’m sure they are) I have a lot of ideas for Care Bears reboots, so just reach out.

That’s about it from me! I should have some new posts soon with old TV appearances I digitized, and possibly a show announcement.

Thanks for reading. I love you.

1 I know that’s technically a Care Bear Cousin, Wisenheimer.

2 Or a figure like it. Look, I never said I sold EVERYTHING.