Historically, the ‘Malleus Maleficarum’, or ‘The Hammer of Witches’, was a book written in 1486 by a pair of ornery witch hunters, during the height of the persecution of these perceived ‘witches’. The invention of the printing press around this time allowed the book to spread far and wide, despite being banned by the Catholic Church as ‘unethical’. It’s a very interesting read, with entire chapters dedicated to things like “What do you do if you’ve been physically emasculated by a witch?”, which seemed to be a fairly major concern. That, and witchcraft being an affront to God, of course - but mostly, there was a lot of terror about strange vanishings in trouser town, all written in an anecdotal style akin to ‘one time I heard about this guy and this thing TOTALLY happened to him.’

The book also addresses the fact that witches can turn men into beasts, though they rarely seem to turn other females into lesser forms. By extension, these witches also had the power to make themselves ridiculously seductive, so that barely any magic was needed against whichever male they sought to ruin - just purely biological sex appeal. This is the complicated premise of the eleventh and latest set of Demons Chronicle gashapon, created by Yanoman in Japan.

I’ve always loved this ongoing collection for just how bizarre and obscure the premises for each set of surreal creatures has been. Because everything is written in Japanese, I know very little about the origins of each specific, diverse figure, but every time I obtain a new set (always ordered directly from Japan, as there’s no real market for them in the US), it’s always a fun game of detection and discovery, trying to glean the purpose of everything - looking up Japanese mythology, piecing together hiragana phrases, and eventually coming up with not a lot, but learning interesting things nonetheless. The creatures inspire new paintings from me, and it’s worth the nervous wait as a box of these things makes its untrackable way from overseas.

This eleventh series is composed entirely of female figures in mythical animal forms. They’re about 2 inches tall, with an additional heavy base for each figure, and they all come disassembled into about six or seven pieces each, which must be put together very delicately. Every figure comes in two different color schemes - a painted, full-color version, and a beige, statuesque version. New to this series is the option to display each figure with a human head, or an alternate scary animal head - revealing the duality of the nature of these shapely witches. Don’t be fooled, guys - it’s no fun to make out with a bird skull.

Since these do come from overseas, where the attitude towards the nude human form is more relaxed, many of the Demons Chronicle figures might be considered risqué. Still, it isn’t without reason. A witch in a baggy sweater isn’t going to be quite as effective as a naked one. Combining female forms with animal forms is also nothing new for Japanese toys - but most of the examples of this also wouldn’t be appropriate for a PG blog.

The most bizarre figure in the series is the rotund Elephant Woman, who comes with a pachyderm head, and clutching a giant fork and knife - which strikes me as a strangely malicious depiction of the overweight. I can always enjoy a good succubus hanging off of a church steeple, a frog faerie, and an Egyptian-themed depiction of a female Grim Reaper with an alternate skull head. I enjoy them because they’re such a large step away from what we usually see in figural form in our own mass toy market. I can only take so many iterations of Spider-Man before I stop being interested and need a break.

There are ten different witches in the series, with a rare eleventh mystery figure. You can see nine of them in our Community Section, at the end of my Demons Chronicle collection.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23rd, 2008 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.