A $50 Doctor Doom bust made of bricks is a joke that landed. The $400 resin one is the dare.

LEGO’s September 1 Doom bust is 379 pieces and aimed at desks. The high-end statue market should be nervous for a boring reason: good enough got cheaper.

On September 1 you can buy a brick-built Doctor Doom bust for fifty bucks. It is not going to fool anyone who owns a Sideshow piece. It is going to look like Doom from across a room, which is the actual assignment for 90 percent of collectors.

The premium statue market has spent a decade convincing us that ‘display’ means ‘mortgage a square foot.’ Sometimes that is true. A great portrait statue is sculpture. A lot of what ships is just a still from a movie, frozen, with a price that assumes you lost an argument with yourself.

Most shelves do not need museum pieces. They need a face that reads from the door.

I like that LEGO is crashing that party with something you can rebuild if you drop it. It is the same character, a different religion: play versus shrine. With Doomsday looming, we are about to get a wave of green-hooded objects. Buy the one you will still want if the movie is only fine.

For me that is the little brick head, not the resin that needs its own lighting plan. I want to look at Doom while I write. I do not want to dust him like a relic.