Why Toyfare Isn’t Getting a Re-Subscribe
As pretty much everyone knows, at least if you’ve been around here for any length of time, my wife and I collect action figures, among other things. We’re just collectors, we’ve been doing it for years, there aren’t a lot of things that we haven’t, at one point in time or another, collected if we had any interest in it. That means everything from comic books/manga to DVDs, TV series to stamps and coins are here somewhere. I’ve even got a collection of cheetah collector plates and lithographs, although I haven’t added to it for years.
Perhaps our most active current collection though, is action figures and it’s something we’ve both been doing for decades, even long before we ever knew each other. My wife worked in a toy store when she was in high school and she started buying Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures and sealing them away. I, of course, have collected everything from Star Wars to television and movie toys, etc.
For a long time, we’ve subscribed to Toyfare, mostly because it’s been the only real game in town. My wife liked reading Twisted Toyfare Theater, which is where Robot Chicken had it’s origins and I paged through their Incoming section to see if there was anything on the horizon I wanted to keep an eye out for.
The problem is, Toyfare… sucks. It, like other magazines in the Wizard line, is well-known for kissing the asses of their advertisers and pretty much ignoring everything else. If you’re buying ad-space, you can bet that you’ll have articles written about you and they’ll all be shining reviews, so long as the money keeps flowing. This is true of their comics magazine, it was true of Inquest, their gaming magazine and it’s certainly true of their toy magazine.
However, we don’t want ass-kissing, we want information. We want to know what’s actually coming out, when it’s coming out and where to get it. We don’t care about endless articles on forgotten 80s toy properties, we don’t care about their poor attempts at humor. we certainly don’t care about their articles on video games, movies or comic books, if we wanted those, we’d subscribe to video game magazines. Oh wait, we do! However, in the last issue of Toyfare, they had an article on the upcoming Batman animated movie and video game, a 10-page article on “upcoming video games” they want to play and a 3-page companion piece on “retro toy lines and cartoons that we want to play on our favorite next gen systems!” So much for being, as they say on the cover, “The Toy Magazine”.
What we want is a complete list of what’s coming, what’s in each release and when we can expect it. We want a comprehensive encyclopedia of exactly what each company has coming, a complete list of what’s in each release, pictures of each figure, if available and maybe the packaging too if you can. Tell us what day it’s coming out, or at least closer than “2010″ and where it will be. Toyfare just doesn’t offer that, it never really has and we’re just tired of paying for something that doesn’t give us what we want.
Unfortunately, there’s only two major action figure magazines out there, Toyfare and Lee’s Action Figure. The last time I picked up Lee’s was years back and it came off as a cheap alternative, bad paper, almost all black and white, etc. So recently, we popped into Barnes & Noble to take a look again since we had already decided to drop Toyfare.
It’s a lot slicker today, a lot more colorful, but still not the magazine that we want to buy. Like Toyfare, you get a smattering of what’s coming out… sometime. Is it a complete list? No. Does it give any details? Dates? Prices? Nope. It’s not as childish as Toyfare, they don’t do cute captions or stupid cartoons, but it doesn’t give any better information on what we care about than Toyfare does, so they haven’t earned my subscription dollars either.
I can get online and get the same amount of information for nothing, I just have to do all the work. That’s really what I was paying Toyfare for, but since they don’t want to do any of the work, why give them any of my money. Maybe we’ll just keep our fingers crossed for a better magazine or a better online source that actually provides the kind of in-depth coverage we really want. Otherwise, I guess that’s just more money to actually spend on figures and I can’t complain about that.
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