To clarify terminology, "original" masks are those that come directly from the luchador in question. They are all official merchandise by definition. Most of the masks that I'll be presenting are also "luchada", or ring-worn, but a few will be new.
The masks that I'm highlighting are not necessarily my favorites on an absolute scale, and to be honest, I have trouble constructing a ranking past about, oh, two. I'm choosing the masks for something that stands out to me, be it a story behind the mask, the design, or sometimes both.
I'll be doing these blog posts in chronological order. Let's start with 2013.
First, some background: as I mentioned, my original mask collection started in March 2013. By this point, I had been a lucha fan for a couple of years. I had bought several unofficial masks from various mascareros in Mexico but hadn't yet figured out how to get original masks. Keep in mind that, back then, there was no store like Republic of Lucha or other official stores, and luchadors were generally much more discreet about selling merchandise over social media.
Nowadays, most luchadors will outright say that masks or shirts are available for sale and to contact them privately, but in the early 2010s, there was much more of an implicit understanding in the lucha community that anything posted -- and maybe even some things that weren't -- might be for sale and that interested parties should contact the luchador privately to inquire.
Those of you who know me are well aware of my high level of introversion, and as such, it generally takes conscious effort for me to expand my social sphere, even though I tend to ultimately enjoy doing so in small increments. In early 2013, I initially reached out to Titán on Facebook in a desperate attempt to figure out where to purchase T-shirts of his, since there was no such thing as an official online store. To my surprise, he replied that I could arrange to buy them directly through him. I did so, and while I was at it, asked whether he had masks to sell. I bought two.
This transaction introduced me to the cultural differences between American banking and Mexican banking. PayPal was very much not a thing in Mexico at the time, and even today, ten years later, there's an air of begrudging reluctance in its adoption. Payment by bank transfer was and still is the norm; even the US Consulate gets paid that way. As risk-averse as I am, somehow I must have calculated in my head that this was likely to go okay. I paid and got the masks and T-shirts by DHL very quickly.
One of the masks is a tricolor mask:
There are photos of Titán wearing it on the streets of Japan during Fantasticamanía earlier that year, and we think that he may have worn it as a presentation mask at one point, although finding hard evidence of that is difficult.
The second mask of the set is a standard navy blue Titán mask, unworn:
At this point in my mask collecting journey, I wasn't seeking ring-worn masks. I just wanted it to be accurate, and unofficial mask makers were having some difficulty with Titán's design.
The third original mask from 2013 that I'll highlight is a Volador Jr. mask in the style of Green Lantern:
I bought this in April of that year, when Volador Jr. was selling a bunch of merch in order to help his father to pay medical bills. At the time, this was a rather rare exception to the tendency to avoid directly advertising merch for sale, so I saw it as a good opportunity to acquire a special mask.
As I've said elsewhere, I myself am not a huge fan of comics for their own sake, but when it means special merch from luchadors who love comics (of whom Volador Jr. is very obviously one), I'm all over that.
The mask has evidence of use and is very obviously washed, but as I mentioned, ring-worn use wasn't on my radar at the time, so I didn't bother to try to put a date the mask. I have plenty of DVDs of CMLL from this time period, but even then, not everything was broadcasted, so investigating would be a lot of trial-and-error and wouldn't be guaranteed to produce a definitive answer, since I believe quite a few of these Green Lantern masks were made.
One other point of significance is that I got this mask a mere handful of months before Volador Jr. lost his mask to La Sombra at CMLL Aniversario 80 in September of that year. I'm happy that I figured out how to buy an original mask from him before that loss.
Anyway, that wraps up 2013. I'll try to do these posts around three times per week, so that the series finishes by the end of March.
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