All Posts tagged kaiju

ALIMAÑA Toys: Hecho en Mexico!

Something you don’t see every day on the header card of a kaiju toy is the phrase “Hecho en Mexico”. But then again, Mexico City’s ALIMAÑA aren’t your average toy company. Beto Matalí, Bela Álvarez, Emmy Hernández, Victor Hernández and Cieromuco have been making toys as ALIMAÑA for about 3 years, and it’s time you got to know them. As luck would have it, Bela has family in the Bay Area. After their first face-to-face meeting with ALIMAÑA-collaborator Mark Nagata, Mark, Bela, Oscar (a 3D animator currently working in Mexico City) and I chatted over sushi.

JB: How did ALIMAÑA get started?

Bela: In the beginning, it was Beto and I working together on different projects. Then we began working with Emmy and Victor. Beto and I did the toys, and they did the illustrations. With the addition of Carlos, who designed the character for Bacteria, we are now 5 guys working together. Well, 3 guys and 2 girls.

What does ALIMAÑA mean?

Bela: ALIMAÑA means vermin. It’s like a little bug. Beto and I didn’t have jobs, and we thought about doing something to get money. So we said “What can we do? Lets do T-shirts.” That was like 5 years ago. We designed special shirts for a Lord of the Rings convention because we love it. But we needed a name and a brand, so we came up with ALIMAÑA and we designed the logo. That was the beginning. Then we did different things, so when we started with the toys and we needed a brand, we said, we have one.

How did you get set up with production and a factory?

Bela: We started with the idea and the sculpture. We used 3D modeling software and made all the changes and chose the colors and and finally we went into production. The factory is in Mexico City.

Oscar: Mexico still has a lot of manufacturing. Before China came into the scene, Mexico was the place where you did dolls. There were a lot of factories. We had 2-3 very important toy companies, but China came with lower prices, and all the factories in Mexico started to close. The factories still there are small and not for big brands and the mainstream markets. So ALIMAÑA went to those guys to see if they could make these special things.

Why toys? Read the rest of this entry »

New Fire Robo, Fenton and Mongolion in Store Now!

A trio of new vinyls from Super7 has just arrived in the Neon Monster shop in San Francisco and in cyberspace. First up, Brian Flynn’s candy cutie, Fenton, in a 3-inch gotta-have-it glow-in-the-dark with pink colorway. At just $15, the little snack is already sold out at Super7, but we’ve got a few left. Next up, L’amour Supreme’s 5-inch incredibly detailed Mongolion figure gets busy in clear red with some teal and yellow sprays. Finally, local guy Jeremy Whiteaker joins the 4-inch Super7 Monster Family with his Fire Robo character. This is the premier colorway in glossy black and red, meaning as with most first iterations of toys and many black and red colorways, it’s the one you will probably kick yourself for missing. You should also check out Jeremy’s blog, Mutant Massacre, for full details on test shots and the whole making of the Fire Robo figure.

Vajazzling With Carlos Enriquez-Gonzalez

Like Madonna in her 1992 baseball flick, Carlos Enriquez-Gonzalez is in A League of Their Own. The pop star similarities end there, although you could make a case for an ally in fellow triple-named vajazzler Jennifer Love Hewitt. I’ve been following Carlos’ work for a couple years now, and where many artists ebb and burn out, Carlos keeps bringing it. And in case you don’t have eyeballs, he’s bringing a lot of vaginas.

Of his 2007, 13-inch fiberglass Vagina Brain Monster which was part of a 2008  Contemporary Art Phillips de Pury auction, Steve Agin wrote:

“For Mr. Gonzalez, a vagina represents passage in time and space and, the journey from one reality to another, possibly a more enlightened one.”

Color me enlightened. Of his 2009, 9-foot hand-painted fiberglass Magical Vagina, which sold at auction for $15,000, Carlos himself said:

“I intend the confrontation with the free spectator, give him something that invites him to reflect about the theme on how this feminine organ has been mistreated and denigrated, because the vagina can connect us with the most pure, powerful and mysterious forces of the universe, God present? The vagina has been wounded for a long time, ’skimmed blood’.”

Um, yes, exactly. Carlos’ latest 9-Foot Mother Lips Vagina Monster (shown at the top of this post) is also for the Phillips de Pury auction. I’d like to chat up the person who has the balls (or ovaries) and taste to buy this walking orifice that dwarfs them. Such an art collector is likely to be as interesting as the piece itself. Keep it coming, Carlos! Photos courtesy of the Mishka Bloglin and Carlos’ Flickr.

Mark Nagata is the (Ultra)Man

Right off the bat, there are a few things you should know about Mark Nagata.

1. He may or may not have THE largest Ultraman collection in the world, but take my word (or look at the pictures): it’s massive.
2. He believes (kind of) that kaiju (Japanese monsters) really do exist.
3. Mark looks a good decade younger than his birth certificate would tell you: “All the vinyl fumes are preserving me. They’re either killing me or preserving me.”

In addition to possessing that secret to youthful longevity, Mark is one of the nicest guys working in the toy scene today. Beyond being the proprietor of Max Toy Co, he’s an incredibly talented artist and illustrator. The header cards on his toys merely hint at his artistic skills. This combination of art, toys and long-term San Francisco residency intrigued me, so naturally I invited myself over to see Ultraman Mecca and ask Mark a ton of questions. Even after lobbing hard balls at him, he invited me back for a second round. Thanks to Mark-san for being such a great host, and now, let’s get started.

JB: How did you begin collecting Japanese toys?

MN: Growing up in southern California, I liked to draw and watch Saturday sci-fi and horror movies. When I was 10, I had an aunt living in Japan, who for one Christmas,  sent me this massive box  of toys. Up until then,  I had played with 12-inch GI Joes and Hot Wheels like every kid, and then I get this crapload of Japanese toys. I opened the box, and I was like what the heck are these things? Who’s this space dude with a gold star on his forehead  kicking this other creature who looks like he’s made out of fire? It just totally blew me away.

After recovering from that awakening, what did you do next?

By 1974, I was living in  San Francisco, and I’d go to Japantown with my father and grandfather. This was in the midst of when Bullmark Japan was at its height. I would slowly add to my little Japanese toy collection over the next 2-3 years. The toy thing started waning as I got to be pre-teen because Bullmark went out of business (around 1976-77), and I was getting more into drawing and comic books. Junior high through high school, I didn’t follow or collect toys. It wasn’t even on my mind.

Going through high school in San Francisco, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. I went to City College and met this art teacher and he said: “You should probably go to art school. I see some potential.”  So I left City College and went to the Academy of Art for about 2 years. I didn’t complete my courses there because I definitely knew I wanted to do commercial work. The Academy, at that time, was more fine art-oriented, and they looked down on what I wanted to do, which was super realistic airbrushing and stuff.

I know you did original paintings for the covers of RL Stine’s Goosebumps! You were working very successfully as a commercial illustrator. What happened?

After illustrating for 13 years, I got burnt out, and on top of that, everybody wanted computer stuff. A few years prior, in the late 80s and early 90s, I had picked back up collecting Ultraman stuff. This was obviously before The Internet, so I got some reference books all in Japanese and would start marking them off.  I was reading this tabloid-sized magazine called Toy Shop, which would come out every two weeks, and it was just toy ads of all different types. I found a couple contacts in Japan through that; I would Xerox my want list,  fold it up and mail it off and wait.  I’d have this big list going, and then about the later half of the 90s, that’s when eBay and email started coming in. I just went bonkers, searching Bullmark, Ultraman and going to toy shows.

How did you get involved with Super7?

Around the time that I was getting out of illustration, I got a call from Jimbo Madison, a real Renaissance guy. He came up with an idea with Chronicle Books to do a nice glossy coffee table book about Japanese toys and how cool and funky they are. Somehow he got my name and Brian Flynn’s name and says, “I know you don’t know me, but I’d like to take pictures of hundreds of your toys.” Both Brian and I showed up with our toys at the photo shoot. We’re just sitting there while they’re taking the pictures, and Jimbo shows me this zine he’s been doing with Bwana Spoons. I thought: this is really cool, and I said we should do a zine all about Japanese toys. Jimbo hears all this and says: “You should think bigger. Why don’t you guys do a full color, glossy national magazine, sell ads, go all out?”

That really changed my life. What he said made me realize a lot of humans have limitations. You grow up with your parents saying: “Do something safe.” I thought, yeah you’re right, if we’re gonna do this, why not do it up? If it doesn’t work , it doesn’t work, but nobody’s ever done it before. At that point, it’s me, Brian and Jimbo. I’ve got Ultraman covered, Brian has Godzilla, Jimbo has Micronauts. And the other thing we had in common was that we all liked art. So we thought: lets combine art with the toys, all in English. That’s how the Super7 magazine started. From there, it was 6 years of the magazine and opening the store.

And how did you get un-involved with Super7?

The San Francisco store started with me, Brian and Mark Miyake. I’ve been gone from Super7 for about five years. I would just say we had different ideas about where it was going, and it’s very hard to make partnerships work. It was for the best for both of us. With my own toy company, I had a very clear vision about what types of characters I wanted to do.

Let’s talk about the word kaiju and your aesthetic. People get very ornery around this subject. [Just yesterday, there was a heated debate here.]

The word kaiju has been bastardized. It’s like otaku. Here, otaku is like a hip geek thing. In Japan, it’s not cool; it’s even lower than major nerd: it’s a pathological psychological problem there. With the toys, for lack of terminology early on, we would say “everything’s like Godzilla,” because people didn’t understand what Bullmark was. After a while, “Godzilla” didn’t fit every situation, so kaiju sort of started coming up.

Read the rest of this entry »

Glitter Big Sal, Tokoichi Seiyu, Mini Deathra and Pocket Zag in Store Tomorrow

Tomorrow, Saturday, around 1PM, we’ll have a quartet of new goodies from Super7 in the online shop. Sure to sell out quick is the new Monster Family Smoke Glitter Big Sal by Kathie Olivas and Brandt Peters. The new colorway of Big Sal is 4 inches of dark grey glitter with black and grey stripes. Tokoichi Seiyu is the latest collaboration between Gargamel and Cometdebris with six colors on light blue vinyl. Mini Deathra, the winged cyclops, is back in red vinyl with blue sprays. Finally, good things come in small packages, like this Pocket Zagaron in clear red vinyl with green sprays. Check the shop tomorrow afternoon for the new releases!

Mark Nagata Paints Kaiju

This is Part 2 of a Mark Nagata extravaganza! If you’re looking for Part 1, hang tight, and you’ll Meet Your Maker on Monday. Mark was a great host. We talked a lot, and I took a billion pictures. Part 1 focuses on Mark’s toy collection and his ideas about art, toys and Max Toy Co. Part 2 (what you’re looking at here) brings you a behind-the-scenes glimpse of painting in progress. So without further ado, let’s grab the Monster Kolor and spray up a Mini Kaiju TriPus.

For all you types who skip to the end of a book  first, here’s a magic time lapse you can click, and depending on the swiftness of your Internet connection, watch the toy take shape. (Did you think the era of the animated .gif was over?) If you like surprises, continue reading. Let’s take it step by step.

After carefully severing the TriPus head, Mark hits the clear vinyl with some yellow.

A quick video interlude: So, Mark, what’s going through your head as you do this? Read the rest of this entry »

Super7 Lucky Bags in the Store Now!

Super7 Lucky Bags, photo by Kaiju Chronicle

Super7 celebrated its 9th anniversary this weekend, and Neon Monster has a small allotment of Lucky Bags in the store now. Per Toybot Studios, each bag contains:

• 1 Mascot
• 1 Collab (S7 vs ??)
• 1 Snakes of Infinity
• 2 Monster Family
• 1 Pocket
• 1 Candy figure

Super7 Lucky Bag, photo by Toybot Studios

One of the most exciting figures discovered in the bags has been a pink GID Monster Family figure by David Horvath and Sun-Min named Power Mister. Other cool surprises include: unpainted figures, signed figures, never-before-seen colorways, mash-ups, hybrids and customs by Leecifer, Paul Kaiju and Brian Flynn. What will your bag contain? Each bag is sealed, so only you will know. Judging from the twitpics posted over the weekend, people seem pretty happy with the contents of the bags they got. Of course, there’s now new fodder for trading. Check out a few photos of the bags’ interiors below. Note that these are examples only. Every bag is a surprise. If you want to see some potential contents, check out these Flickr sets by Fiends Ain’t Family, Toybot Studios and Dril One.

Get your Lucky Bag here. Limit one per household.

Super7 Lucky Bag, photo by Dril One

Lucky Bag Power Mister by David Horvath/Sun-Min, photo by Dril One

Lucky Bag Customs by Brian Flynn, Leecifer and Paul Kaiju, photos by Kaiju Chronicle

Mini Neon Pink Kaiju From Max Toy Co

This is the first release of the Mini Kaiju Series from Max Toy Co. These are unpainted neon pink vinyl sculpted by Satoru Doki of Yamo-Mark of Japan, produced and Made In Japan. Each figure is 3 inches tall and comes bagged with a header card. This new series of mini kaiju toys feature five characters from Mark Nagata’s original line-up (Eyezon, Alien Xam, TriPus, Drazoran and Captain Maxx) shrunk down into a super-deformed style.

Hard to go wrong with tiny neon pink monsters. Get ‘em individually or as a full set of 5 figures at a 20% discount for $60 here.

The Hot Seat With Super7’s Brian Flynn (Part 1)

Last year, Brian Flynn and I began a conversation about kaiju toys and Super7. No matter what people (including me) wrote about Super7’s products, it seemed somehow we were always on the periphery and not quite on the mark. After a couple email volleys plumbing Brian’s brain about specific toys, I realized the real guts of the story were elsewhere, and the idea for The Hot Seat (respect to Wired) was born. Brian has been collecting toys for over 20 years. His shop, Super7, will soon celebrate its 9th anniversary. Who better than a toy collector, toy designer, toy retailer, toy manufacturer and toy punk to inaugurate a critical column about all those things? This interview comprises conversations Brian and I had over a few months in writing and in person. I hope this column inspires dialogue. (Best enjoyed with a tall cup of caffeine…)

JB: Super7, among Western collectors, is pretty much considered to be “the kaiju guys.” I know you think this falls short of the truth.

BF: Even though we’re the “the kaiju guys,” if you look at the products we manufacture, we don’t make “kaiju.” We aren’t making toys in 1960 and 1970. We’re making toys today, so we take our inspiration from classic kaiju toys and reinterpret it for the current day. 2009 was: Gorilla Biscuits, Ooze Bat, Mongolion, Mummy Boy, Mummy Gator, Hollis Price, Steven the Bat, Vampire Rose, Partyball, Dokuwashi SD resin, Milton, Fenton, etc. None of these are Ultraman, Godzilla or retro figures; they’re current figures. The mental island we’ve made for ourselves is hard for anyone to break out of, and hard for others to see past when looking at our products. We are in between scenes, trying to make our own scene and our own identity, so that twenty years from now, people will look back on what we made and think it was unique to the time, and not a rehash of someone else’s idea.

One of the reasons I like “art toys” is because many of the artists came out of the same subcultures that I did. So when an artists make a reference, I get it, and I like getting it. It’s a nice feeling to “get” art. On the other hand, I can look at the Ooze Bat and think, well this is kind of cool-looking, but what exactly am I looking at and what’s this “Hawaii Colorway” all about? I think people struggle with “getting” your toys.

I think in some ways people over think it. Sometimes, it just looks cool. Ooze Bat is cool, and has nothing to do with traditional kaiju. It’s designed after an obscure 1970s U.S. monster toy called the Ooze-It. It was filled with slime, and when you squeezed it, it oozed out of the plugs. Chanmen from Gargamel loves this toy and used it as his inspiration for designing the Ooze Bat. The only Japanese influence (besides the fact that Chanmen is Japanese) is that it’s in the fight figure scale.

The Hawaii colorway is a reference to the ultra rare Hawaii variant Hedorah figure. (Hedorah the smog monster, a Godzilla kaiju.) There was a very rare version of this figure exported to Hawaii that was a pink vinyl with black, orange, red, silver and metallic green sprays. It is one of the most sought after kaiju figures, as Hedorah is a popular character, and the sculpt and colors are so unique, dynamic and unlike anything else. When someone refers generically to a toy as a “Hawaii version,” they mean painted to mimic the Hawaii Hedorah.

Aha! So there IS a kaiju reference in there (by way of the colorway). Brief me on the anthropology of the common kaiju collector.

The thing with the “Kaiju/Super7” scene is that most of our collectors are much older than other places, and most have been into collecting for many, many years. This isn’t the first thing they’ve collected, and it’s not the last. They collect for themselves, and aren’t really motivated by peer recognition. Because of this, a lot of them aren’t out there engaging in more of the social aspects of the hobby. They would collect toys even if it was only four other people in the world who cared about this stuff. I think that’s a very different point of view [from other types of collectors].

On the flipside, there are a lot of new kids. This is a tricky spot. Most of them are excited about everything, and their general excitement/hyperactivity makes most of the long term collectors want to say “Just settle down and cool off, you are driving me crazy! I don’t need to talk about toys 24 hours a day!” This phase lasts around 6 months until they feel like they’ve got a handle on the scene in a larger sense, and they realize that the world won’t end tomorrow after the latest toy release.

Kaiju collectors are very nice, but they aren’t kids, so they have stuff to do. This is a very social scene, but it’s not a giant clubhouse. They buy what they like and aren’t really concerned whether you like it or not, as no one else they know in their daily lives will ever care about this stuff.

You and I have talked before about toys as toys versus toys as art. Sum up Super7’s philosophy on this. Read the rest of this entry »

The Hot Seat With Super7’s Brian Flynn (Part 2)

[You are reading Part 2 of The Hot Seat with Super7's Brian Flynn. You can find Part 1 HERE.]

JB: I know you’re not a fan of platform toys…

BF: Super7 doesn’t make, buy or sell platform toys. Unless you’re Medicom, you shouldn’t be doing this. The Be@rbrick is the first platform toy, the Qee is a fake Be@rbrick. Kidrobot’s first toy project ever on their own was to make an LA and SF series of Qees. Then KR pulled the project, and decided to come up with their own figure, which was the Dunny. A Dunny is a fake Qee. Everything from there is a knock off of a Dunny, so before you know it, you have ideas that are four, five six generations removed from the source and get more watered down and generic with every step. Look at a lot of the horrible platforms out there with as generic a shape as possible, and tell me if I am wrong.

Go on…

If you’re going to spend all this money making a toy, why are you going to cop out and make a platform? You might as well say, “I don’t believe in my ideas enough to be unique, so I am hoping you will repurpose this into something better for me, and I can make some money along the way.” A platform toy is one half of one person’s idea that is then desperately covered up as hard as possible by a second person. You end up with half of one person’s idea, and half of another for a total of one incomplete idea.

Any great platform you have, you can look at and say “Wow, how much better would that have been if that person could have had free reign with the actual character design as well.” The end result is, now kids think the ultimate level of “making it” is to have someone make a platform toy of their own. This is the worst outcome. You should want to create the best toy possible, and create something new and unique, not another platform. I have no problem with people making white, unpainted versions of their toys for other people to paint, but if you design a toy to be an obsolete platform from the beginning, I am not interested. You will see with every toy we’ve ever made. They are their own toys: 100%.

What was the thinking behind the Neo-Kaiju project produced by STRANGEco?

The idea was to make a great toy project with our friends, and it was co-made between us and STRANGEco. I came up with the idea, pulled it together, and then did all the design, packaging, etc. and they handled the manufacturing and distribution. All of the artists who were included collected Japanese toys in some capacity and were friends of ours. We asked them to take a traditional Japanese character and retweak it in their style. From there, they were then asked to create a new companion character to go with their first character to create a pair of figures from each artist. It was an incredibly popular set of toys and a lot of fun to make.

Right after the Neo-Kaiju project, we made a very deliberate twist away from using names as toy designers. We saw that everyone was doing the same thing, copying each other, trying to buy whoever was hot at the moment and acting like people were their “turf.” We decided then that we would just make Super7 toys, not So and So by Super7. It was important for us that we had our own identity, and you knew if it had our name on it, it was a quality toy. We have no problem telling you who designed the toy, but it’s still a Super7 toy, and it has to meet our standards. I don’t care how hot an artist is, if the idea is dumb, the toy will be dumb, and the most unknown person out there can have a genius idea and usually does.

Speaking of “turf,” care to clear up any rumors about Super7’s turf-tiff within the toy scene? Read the rest of this entry »