A Condition Checklist for Loose Action Figures

Third-party grading in this hobby is overwhelmingly about packaging. Once a figure is out of its bubble there is no number, no slab and no consensus scale, which means the word condition has to be earned by description rather than assigned by a score. That is not a weakness. A specific description is more useful than a number anyway, because it tells you which flaws you are getting rather than how many.

What follows is an inspection you can run in a few minutes with nothing but a bright light and your hands. It is ordered by how much each check costs you and how much it tells you, so the cheap high-value tests come first.

Start with the joints, because a photograph will never tell you

Every other flaw on this page shows up in a decent picture. Joint condition does not, and it is the flaw people mind most once the item is in front of them. A figure that will not stand up is a figure you will not display.

Three tests, in order:

1. The hold test. Pose an arm horizontally and let go. If it sinks, the joint is done. This is the one that matters, because a limb that drifts makes every pose temporary.
2. The stand test. Can it stand unaided, without leaning on anything, for as long as it takes you to walk away? Ankle and hip joints go before shoulders do, and this catches both.
3. The mirror test. Compare a joint to its opposite number. Two shoulders on the same figure should feel about the same. One that is dramatically looser has been worked harder, and one that is dramatically tighter may be seized rather than strong.

Seized joints deserve care rather than force. Old paint, old grease and decades of stillness can effectively glue a joint shut, and the usual result of muscling one is a snapped peg inside a limb where nobody can reach it. Warming the area gently first is the standard approach, and if it still will not move, treat it as a permanent feature of the figure rather than a problem to solve on the spot.

The perishable materials, fastest to slowest

Hard plastic ages slowly. Everything attached to it does not, and the parts that fail are not the parts people inspect.

• Rubber and elastic. Some lines are held together internally by a rubber component rather than by pins, and that component perishes. It is a known and openly discussed maintenance issue in the lines it affects, replacement is normal practice, and a figure that has been repaired this way is not damaged goods — but you should know whether it has been, because it means the figure has been apart.
• Soft vinyl. Softer plastics contain plasticiser to keep them flexible, and over decades that can migrate to the surface. The symptom is a figure that feels faintly tacky and attracts dust to one specific part. It is not dirt, and washing it fixes it only briefly.
• Cloth and soft goods. Capes, robes and costume pieces fade unevenly, go brittle at the seams, and are the first thing to hold a smell. Check the folds, which is where light never reached and where the original colour still is.
• Rooted hair. Look at the crown for glue residue and for thinning, and look at the ends for the flat cut of a childhood haircut. Hair does not recover.
• Adhesives. Applied labels and decals lift at the corners first and yellow along their edges. An old label that is perfectly flat and evenly coloured on an otherwise worn figure is worth a second look.

Sort discolouration before you judge it

People routinely price a figure as ruined when it is merely dirty, and occasionally price a ruined one as dirty. The two are easy to separate.

Take a cotton bud, dampen it with plain water, and roll it across an inconspicuous area. Surface film — household grime, kitchen residue, nicotine — transfers to the bud and leaves a visibly cleaner patch. Discoloured plastic does not transfer anything, because the colour change is in the material rather than on it.

If it is in the material, look at how it is distributed, because the pattern is a history:

• Even, all-over yellowing on light plastics is age-related. It is commonly attributed to the interaction of ultraviolet light with the flame-retardant additives in the plastic, and it affects whites and light greys hardest.
• One-sided yellowing tells you the figure sat on a shelf with a window to one side of it. Turn the piece around: the back is often the original colour, which is also the best evidence of what that colour was.
• Yellowing in the recesses only is usually not yellowing at all. It is grime that has collected where a cloth never went.

A word on the peroxide treatments people use to reverse yellowing. They are widely practised and they do work, but the results can be blotchy, the process can leave the plastic more brittle than it found it, and it can lift paint and decals. Most importantly it cannot be undone. Nobody should be doing it to a figure they have just paid a collector price for, and if a seller has done it, that is worth knowing before rather than after.

Smell, which nobody lists and everybody notices

This is the flaw with the worst ratio of how-often-disclosed to how-much-it-matters. Smoke exposure, mildew, damp basement storage and animal odour all travel with an item, none of them appear in a photograph, and several of them are effectively permanent in cloth and in soft plastic.

Hard plastic can usually be washed. Fabric accessories, rooted hair and porous soft goods often cannot, and a heavily smoke-exposed figure will still announce itself from a shelf months later. If you are buying at a distance and it matters to you, ask. It is a normal question and a straight answer is easy to give.

Signs the figure has been apart

A figure that has been opened is not automatically a worse figure. Repairs, joint tightening and part replacement are ordinary maintenance. What matters is whether you know.

The tells are all around the fasteners and the seams. Chewed screw slots mean an ill-fitting screwdriver. Mismatched screws mean at least one was replaced. A visible bead of adhesive along a seam, or a seam that no longer sits flush, means the halves have been reunited by hand. Whitened plastic radiating from a screw boss means it was over-tightened on the way back together — the general reading of that kind of stress marking is covered in our guide to how plastic damage reads.

Where this shades into a different subject is restoration and replaced parts presented as original, which is its own set of checks and has its own page: spotting reproduction and restored figures.

The five-minute version

When you are standing at a table with a queue behind you, this is the whole thing compressed. It is deliberately in an order where each step can end the inspection.

1. Stand it up and let go.
2. Hold an arm out horizontally and let go.
3. Turn it around and compare front colour to back colour.
4. Run a thumb over the softest plastic on it, checking for tackiness.
5. Look at the screws and the seams on the back.
6. Bring it near your face and smell it.
7. Count the accessories against what you know should be there.

That last step is where condition turns into value, and it is a bigger subject than condition itself — the vocabulary sellers use for it, and what each word actually commits them to, is in loose, complete and MOC explained.

Running it from photographs instead

Buying at a distance means converting each physical check into a request. The useful ones, in rough order of what they save you from:

• A photograph of the figure standing unsupported, not propped or held.
• The back and the underside, since wear and repairs both live there.
• The accessories laid out separately rather than in the figure's hands, so they can be counted.
• A close-up of the moulded stamp, which settles manufacturer and era questions at the same time.
• A plain statement about storage: smoke, pets, damp.

That is the standard we try to hold ourselves to. Every listing photograph is of the actual item rather than a better example of the same figure, and the description names the flaws we can see. We do not grade and we do not authenticate, and we would rather say so plainly than imply an assessment nobody performed. Everything is pre-owned, including anything described as sealed or new — those words describe the state of the item, not its history.

Where to practise

The easiest way to get good at this is volume, and the cheapest volume is the mixed shelf. Our action figures department is the deepest place to look, with more turning up across More Collectibles, and franchise-specific shelves like Star Wars, Marvel and Ninja Turtles if you would rather learn one line properly than many badly. Soft goods and fabric age fastest of all, so if you want to see the perishable end of this in one place, the plush shelf is an education in what cloth does over thirty years.