COLLECTOR INTERVIEW #91: David Willis

We’re back for another Transformers collector interview!

Many fans will know David Willis, whether personally or by reputation. A prolific artist and web cartoonist, he has also contributed significantly to the hobby online, including being instrumental in establishing TFWiki in its current format. Today, he’s giving us a behind-the-scenes peek at his shelves!

Who are you and what do you collect?

I’m David “Walky” Willis, I live in Ohio, I eat too much Taco Bell, I draw a webcomic about repressed college students, I keep TFWiki’s servers paid for, I’m the reason Hass from SSSS.Gridman has a little white cat on her outfit, and I collect (amass?) Transformers. 

Mostly I buy Generations (both regular and Studio Series), but for some characters I go obsessive completo. I have little shrines of Hot Shots, Dinobots, Ravages, Ratchets, The Fallens, Windblades, Sunstorms, and I’m fond of Beast Wars Megatrons and Primals, too. 

My goal is to have little robot guys stand next to each other on a shelf like they’re filing up for school photo day, and I have to say I’ve been very successful at that. Plus, since Siege, Hasbro’s gotten a lot better at making toys that look better standing next to your other toys. Things are in robot scale, now! That’s my Kryptonite. They got me buying live-action movie Studio Series, man. I was done with Movie and they pulled me back in. All they had to do was make an appropriately-sized ’07 Blackout. I’m a skank for robot scale.

tl;dr: I like robots and I like those robots to be with their friends.

What do you love most about Transformers and the hobby?

How funny would it be if, at this very moment, forcing myself to actually examine why I love Transformers caused me to dig up absolutely nothing, realize I’ve wasted my life, and the answered questions just abruptly end here? That’d be wild.

Okay, sidestepping a potential ego-implosion from a true critical examination of my madness, I’d have to say what I love most about Transformers is that I love stories. Transformers toys at their best represent good stories. I wouldn’t have a Detolf filled with Beast Wars Dinobots if there wasn’t ever a good story to ignite that spark. Sometimes you might have to customize a few to be battle-damaged and holding an improvised hammer to really tap visually into that specific story, but that’s still the general foundation of why I’m here. 

I paint all my Ratchet’s helmets red because the red-helmeted Ratchets had the best stories. White-helmeted Ratchet is just some random dude who sounds like Papa Smurf. Red-helmeted Ratchet gets in scrapes above his paygrade and dies sixteen times and maybe flirts with Drift.

Ratchet’s got, like, the worst taste in men. And I think he’d agree.

How has the collecting scene changed since you joined the fandom?

When I started as an adult collector (which is when you turn 18 and start buying your own Transformers toys outside receiving them for your birthday and Christmas), the only way to get an Arcee toy was to wait for them to put boobs on a spider robot so that a convention could sort of make one! The ONLY WAY! 

Or to overpay for a rare MC Axis model kit I wouldn’t be competent to assemble. Fine. Two ways. 

But now they do a few Arcees a year. You can walk into a store and find more than one kind of Arcee! And sometimes they even make Xaarons and Straxuses! And they give you Grimlocks in yellows and teal they refused to give you decades before! It’s friggin’ nuts, man! I’m being over-catered to. And, honestly, I’m fine with it. Maybe my overcrowded shelves aren’t. What will my kids do with this stuff when I die? 

How do you see, or hope to see the scene changing over the next 5 years?

I hope to see it surviving. The population is kind of aging out of action figures in lieu of online games, tariffs are beginning to strangle what market we have left, and if Hasbro hasn’t been sold off to a private equity firm by 2030, I’ll consider that a win. 

Until then, I hope we manage to get Studio Series to blast through as many More Than Meets The Eye/Lost Light characters as possible, as has been hinted at by the design team. I’d love to see the scene changing from G1 Cartoon (now that those are mostly all done) to IDW Comics. Give us G1 again, Hasbro, but in Alex Milne flavor. Trade out boxes for shards. IDW G1 is like that Winnie the Pooh meme where in the second frame he’s got a monocle and a tuxedo.

At the very least, Anode would be a super-cool alt-mode for a toy to have. Futuristic biplane! Give me some of that.

What is the most surprising or outrageous collecting story you have heard?

Nothing will ever beat Greg “M Sipher” Sepelak’s story of finding a Masterforce Minerva at a flea market for fifty cents. Nothing. All my best stories are “I found something on eBay and I overpaid for it.” Hello, Battle In A Box Smokescreen-colored Armada Hot Shot! Like, sure, I own you, but it’s not a great or outrageous story. Just the price.

I guess I did recently discover I have the James Raiz Unicron cover to 3H’s Universe #1. It’s apparently the most rare Transformers comic ever made and an unworn copy is worth thousands of dollars, because I think they weren’t actually produced as promised for Various Reasons, and my best guess is Glen Hallit handed me an early sample/comp issue for being volunteer staff for OTFCC 2003. And that was just in my basement for 22 years. Again, not a great story.

Mine’s probably not worth thousands of dollars, though. It was, after all, in a basement for 22 years. I don’t think “VF” stands for “Very Far from mint.”

I think Jen “Trixter” Ulm has hers on eBay now, though. She was also OTFCC 2003 volunteer staff.

What has been your single biggest success as a collector, or your greatest ever find?

The greatest ever find is, always, finding a pallet piled with new toy case assortments in a Walmart or Target aisle and cracking one of those babies open.

(If it’s Walmart. Walmarts are the wild west where you can do anything because nobody’s watching. Target actually has employees around on the floor who might care that you’re doing this. And so you ask somebody to help you open cases at a Target.)

(There’s no protocol for finding cases at Meijer. This never happens.)

Nothing’s better than finding a case assortment of the next wave of toys and discreetly deploying the sharp edge of your keys. All else is just refreshing websites.

If you could pick one item from your collection to keep, what would it be?

For the longest time, I would’ve said Beast Wars Transmetals Megatron, or at least the Metals version that doesn’t crumble in two. Solid toy (if it’s the Metals version) with nigh-perfect media accuracy. But I think finally I feel safe to say I’d trade up to Beast Wars Again Dinobot — you know, the nicely-decoed War for Cybertron: Kingdom toy that came in a versus set with Tarantulas. That’s also an excellent Transformer toy, and this one’s a dead ringer for the cartoon model. Plus, it helps that it’s not quite as overwrought as the Masterpiece. And way more likely to fit in a pocket than Transart Transmetal Megatron. 

If you could have one item out of someone else’s collection, what would that be?

There’s bound to be some sort of contest prize Beast Wars Dinobot out there somewhere that I’d have no chance of owning without elaborate theft. I try not to think about it.

If you have one of those and it suddenly goes missing, that wasn’t me.

What advice would you give a new collector starting out today?

Us older collectors are gonna start dying off in increasing numbers! Camp out in our yards to wait out our funerals for the inevitable estate sales!

Special thanks to David for their words & photos! Be sure to give them a shout on Bluesky, Instagram and Twitter!