DC Figures
450 sixth-scale figures across 38 manufacturers
The DC sixth-scale archive: 418 figures from 33 makers, from Hot Toys' 2006 Batman and Superman debuts to InArt's hyperreal Dark Knight. Every Batman, Joker and Batmobile, catalogued.
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DC & THE SIXTH SCALE
Marvel explains the modern hobby and Star Wars explains the toy business, but DC explains everything underneath both, because DC invented the superhero. The cape, the secret identity, the city that needs saving: all of it enters the world in a single 1938 comic that cost ten cents. This is the Archive's record of the oldest idea in the hobby, told with our own shelves as the receipts.
Fair warning: this is a love letter. The dates are sourced and the numbers are ours, but somewhere behind this prose a searchlight is sweeping the clouds, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
THE FIRST OF THEM ALL
In June 1938, two kids from Cleveland named Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster put a strongman in a cape on the cover of Action Comics #1 and accidentally founded a genre. Superman was the first superhero, full stop. Every character in this Archive, from every franchise on this site, descends from that ten-cent comic. The pair had sold the rights for 130 dollars, a cheque that has haunted the industry's conscience ever since, and within a year their publisher needed a second miracle. It arrived in May 1939 in Detective Comics #27: a detective dressed as a bat, no powers, all will.
The company would eventually name itself after that comic, which tells you where its heart settled. Superman was the sun, but Detective Comics was the address. Eighty-odd years later our own records say the address has not changed: the two most collected DC characters in this Archive are still Batman and the Joker, the detective and the thing the detective can never quite solve.
THE MAN WHO FLEW FIRST
DC also invented the superhero movie. In 1978, Richard Donner put Christopher Reeve in the suit, sold the whole thing with one immortal promise, "You'll believe a man can fly," and the superhero blockbuster existed where it had not existed before. Eleven years later Tim Burton's Batman turned a summer release into a planetary event and set off a merchandising wave the industry still measures itself against. Marvel gets credit for the cinematic universe, but the door it walked through was hung by DC, twice.
Then, in 1992, DC did something quieter that this hobby has never stopped feeling. Batman: The Animated Series premiered, and in one throwaway episode a writer named Paul Dini needed the Joker to have a henchgirl. Harley Quinn was born in a cartoon, not a comic, and today she stands as the fourth most collected DC character in this entire Archive, twenty-four figures and climbing. No other character here can claim that origin story. The show itself became a pillar too: it is tied with The Dark Knight as the most represented DC screen source in our records, thirty-three entries each, which for a weekday afternoon cartoon is a kind of immortality.
GOTHAM ARRIVES EARLY
Here is the Archive's favorite piece of DC trivia: Gotham beat the boom by two full years. The earliest DC figures in these records are Hot Toys catalogue numbers MMS013 and MMS014, a Batman and a Superman released together in 2006, when the Movie Masterpiece line was barely into double digits and the words "cinematic universe" did not exist. The World's Finest arrived at sixth scale side by side, consecutive numbers in a catalogue that would go on to change the hobby.
That 2006 Batman came from Batman Begins, and the Nolan connection turned out to be the whole ballgame. Christopher Nolan's Gotham gave premium sixth scale exactly what it needed at exactly the right moment: real costumes on real actors, photographed like a crime film, begging to be rendered in fabric and sculpted likeness rather than painted plastic. The hobby's Gotham foundations were poured before Tony Stark ever said four famous words.
2008, THE OTHER BIG BANG
Everyone remembers 2008 as the year of Iron Man, and our Marvel entry tells that story. But 2008 held two detonations, and the second was The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger's Joker became the first comic-book performance to win an acting Oscar, the film became the first comic-book movie to cross a billion dollars, and the hobby found what might still be its single most demanded likeness. The Dark Knight sits at thirty-three entries in this Archive, tied for the most collected DC screen source, sixteen years after release.
The receipts get better. When Hot Toys created its flagship DX line, the premium tier with rolling eyes and rooted hair reserved for its crown jewels, the very first number issued was DX01: the Dark Knight Joker, 2009. Not Batman. The clown got the throne first, and he never really gave it back.
THE CLOWN OUTNUMBERS THE GOD
Every franchise has a statistical soul, and DC's is written in greasepaint. Superman, the character who started everything, stands at twenty-three figures in this Archive. The Joker stands at fifty-two. In this hobby the clown outnumbers the god better than two to one, and the DX ledger is even more lopsided: of the eighteen DX-numbered DC entries in these records, eleven are Jokers. Ledger's bank robber, Nicholson's mime, the Artisan Editions with their tailored suits, the line practically belongs to him.
Add Harley Quinn's twenty-four, Catwoman's sixteen, Bane, the Penguin, and the rest, and Gotham's rogues taken together finally outnumber the Bat himself, one hundred and four to ninety-five. Batman remains the most collected DC character by a mile, five short of a century of figures, but his gallery collectively out-collects him. It is the most Gotham statistic imaginable: even on our shelves, the villains are winning, and the city needs him because of it. More than half of everything DC in this Archive lives in that one city.
THE CAR IS A CHARACTER
DC holds a record no other franchise on this site can touch: it is the only one whose top ten most collected characters include a vehicle. The Batmobile has thirteen entries in this Archive, more than Robin, more than Bane, and that is before you count the Tumbler separately, which we do, because collectors do. Seventeen Bat-machines in total, from the 1989 Burton beauty to Nolan's military brute, each one the size of a coffee table and the price of a holiday.
An entire manufacturer grew around that appetite. Jazzinc Dioramas has thirty-six DC entries here, the second most of any maker, and nearly all of it is Gotham furniture: Batmobiles, Batcaves, throne rooms and rooftops for figures to live in. Sixth scale usually stops at the figure. DC taught the hobby to collect the garage too.
MANY HANDS ON THE CAPE
After Hot Toys' 197 entries, DC's guest list runs thirty-three makers deep and wonderfully weird. Mondo built its DC catalogue on the Animated Series, thirty entries of Bruce Timm's clean lines made dimensional. Sideshow kept the comic heroes premium through the years Hollywood wobbled. And the modern hyperreal wave broke on Gotham first: InArt has eighteen entries here, its rooted-hair Dark Knight Joker and Batman setting the new benchmark for what a likeness can be, with JND Studios pushing the same frontier from Korea.
And then there is the shadow gallery, because the appetite for these characters was always bigger than the license. SooSooToys has built twenty-nine carefully coded entries, almost all of them Bat-family. Mars Toys adds sixteen more, and Flash Point Studio chose its own name as a DC pun and rescued the screen characters the licenses passed over. Gotham's back alleys, it turns out, extend all the way into the hobby itself.
DC IN THE ARCHIVE
All told: 450 DC figures from 38 manufacturers, from those two 2006 Movie Masterpiece pioneers to seventeen preorders already dated 2027. It is the third pillar of Kollectorium, behind Marvel and Star Wars, and the one with the oldest soul. A new Superman era is unfolding on screens, The Batman's Gotham has a sequel on the slate, and somewhere a sculptor is working on a Joker likeness nobody has announced yet. History suggests we should believe them capable of anything.
Marvel's heroes are loved because they are like us. DC's are loved because they are what we reach toward: the ideal, the will, the symbol on the chest. A DC shelf is a skyline, searchlight and all, and every figure on it is somebody's answer to a very old question about what a person could be at their absolute best. Or, in fifty-two documented cases, at their absolute worst, smiling about it. The Archive keeps the record either way.