ABSTRACT
This chapter asserts that action figures can be successfully scrutinized alongside similar interrelated companion commodities from myriad critical perspectives. It focuses on five interrelating contrasts relating to their intensively "spreadable" transmedial address to users, their emphatically remediated seriality, contrasting emphasis on simulations of scale and sculpted detail, interplay between objective presence and engineered functionality, and the enduring ironies embedded in their use as playthings and their reverence as collected investments. The chapter helps the reader to promote the lively art of toying with playthings in the most productive, provocative, and passionate of ways. No single example of the synergistic union of comics and action figures better demonstrates the power dynamics of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century market trends than the globe-conquering Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT). Beginning in 1987, TMNT had its own jolly, free-styling kids' TV series. That series, not the original comics of sarcastic subversion, created the popular toy line's charismatic appeal and broke sales records.
