In another periodic exploration of the urban vinyl and designer toy scene, let’s take a casual glance over at what’s currently at the top of the list. Casually! Don’t let them know we’re looking. They’re surly.
The first item in my trifecta of palm-sized awesomeness is Akamushi’s Cardboy series of toys, by UK artist Mark James. While most of these mini-figures usually come in series that offer a large variety of characters in ‘mystery boxes’, never letting you know what you’re going to get in any given box, Cardboy figures ARE the boxes that they come in.
In a beautifully innovative move, the Cardboy figure emerges when you turn the box itself inside-out and re-fasten the tabs. Contained within the box are pegs and a few body parts, as well as the pattern that represents the Cardboy’s character. Once you pop a few pegs in and invert the sturdy box, your Cardboy is ready to go! Maybe it’s my fetish for toys that require some assembly, but these are probably the greatest thing to happen to the lowbrow-art toy market. There’s a variety of eight different Cardboys, some more rare than others, all of them truly awesome. Be careful when you’re opening them and assembling them – cardboard isn’t the most durable material ever, but part of the appeal of these figures is the makeshift, slightly-worn-and-bent look of them. I like to think that’s part of my appeal also. Like Sloth from The Goonies, but with a beard.
Second on today’s list are the Mongers, distributed by Kidrobot and created by renowned artist Frank Kozik. One of Kozik’s more popular ventures into the urban vinyl scene was his ‘Smorkin’ Labbit’, which happens to be a simplified bunny smoking a cigarette, with a removable upper-shell which revealed a skeleton underneath. Kozik isn’t the first artist to stick cigarettes into things to increase their inherent hipness, and there’s more than a passing reference to the artist known as Kaz and his notorious comic in which a cat proclaims that ’smoking isn’t cool’, but that death IS. 
The Mongers amplify that theme to a point of ridiculousness, sticking cigarettes into salt and pepper shakers, cupcakes, bananas and even into larger cigarettes. It’s an art culture that embraces a certain amount of vice, all the while acknowledging how wasteful it is. In this series, you can get any one of seventeen different smoking things, all of them angry and bizarre.
Last come the Blow Up Dolls, produced by Jamungo. Before you start thinking too hard about that, they have bombs for heads, thus the ‘blow up’ in their name. The designer toy market has only explored inflatable toys marginally at this point, but expect to see more in the future. Blow Up Dolls are another example of anthropomorphication making things cute. Stick eyes and a mouth on something and it’s immediately something that you can relate to. There are ten to collect in this first series, and each comes with a plastic match accessory – presumably to light themselves off with. While all having the same body type, their paint schemes are designed by different Pop Surrealist artists, including the aforementioned Kozik.
There’s such an incredible variety of these ‘designer toys’ that nothing looks out of place in any display that you choose to set them in, because nothing ever really looks IN place. And while smoking and bombs aren’t your usual fare for kids’ toys, these are clearly aimed at an adult market appreciative of art and fun.
