I’ve been a little in love with toy company Mezco since I blundered upon their Hellboy toys many a Toy Fair ago and found myself completely enthralled with the luminescenet blue-green sheen on a perfectly sculpted Abe Sapien figure. At that point, I had no idea who or what he was - just that it was probably the greatest toy I’d ever seen. I gave it my official ‘Most Awesome Thing of Toy Fair’ award that year - an award that mostly consisted of me saying ‘Man, that’s pretty awesome!’ and posting a big picture of it on my homepage. I was no-budget back then.

So, when Mike Drake, Director Of Special Projects & Administrator from Mezco invited me for a personal tour around their offices in Queens, NY, I tried not to waste too much time hopping a train and a subway to their location, all while clutching a set of directions that involved both the words ‘troll’ and ‘Robocop’. That’s how you know you’re in for a good time. Mike Drake’s probably the most engaging and jovial ‘toy guy’ I’ve ever met, clearly very into the toys as art forms, home decor and collectibles. He warned me not to expect The Wonka Factory, but he probably underestimated how easily entertained I am. I half-expected to meet a Slugworth at the door, imploring me to swipe a Sylar from the upcoming series of Heroes figures.

The Mezco offices, located on the 5th floor of an unassuming building and up a truly ancient elevator, were capacious and lined tastefully with Mezco’s products displayed in rows of black shelves. We traversed the floor’s wide-open spaces designated to design, product photography, toy storage, recreation and other toy-things more technical, and found ourselves in the ‘War Room’ - a whole area filled with bits and pieces of prototypes destined for approval or re-tooling, which is the process of correcting a loose joint, or a not-quite-right sculpt before the figure moves into final production.

Spread across the shelves were tiny Selma Blair heads, super-articulated bodies to be used for Warriors figures, first drafts of things that didn’t quite turn out as expected, accessories, and all manner of things that were works-in-progress. As a collector (and a giant geek-o-nerd for Heroes and Hellboy), seeing the process that goes into these things was pretty damned awesome.

Mezco doesn’t do any sculpting on premises, instead using freelance sculptors at other locations, and while most companies sculpt the original designs for their figures at twice the size that the final figure will be (or, as they’re known to toygeeks, 2-ups), Mezco keeps almost all of their sculpting at actual figure scale - and they actually still sculpt their likenesses from scratch also, while some other companies have gone the way of digital scanning. The accuracy and expressiveness of Mezco’s original sculpts is evident.

It was in this War Room that we were given an exclusive first look at Mezco’s two exclusive figures from the upcoming New York Comic Con, which is only weeks away.

The first of these two items is a rotocast figure of Biggie Smalls, aka The Notorious B.I.G., aka Christopher Wallace. The figure is done in Mezco’s artistic ‘stylized’ style, giving him an urban, grafitti-style appearance. Unlike Mezco’s long sold-out previous Biggies, this time he’ll be decked out in a yellow, fabric jersey (as featured in one of his videos), and include a handful of accessories - a gold chain, a towel, sunglasses, and a microphone. Also, despite being a rotocast figure, he’ll still have a great 12 points of articulation. He’s limited to 2000 units, and will cost $30 at the show. The figure already has a buzz surrounding him, being featured on both MTV and in NME Magazine - so if you can’t get to New York, there’s a good chance that there’ll be a few left over to purchase from Mezco Direct, Mezco’s online store.

The second exclusive item is also a stylized rotocast figure, this time of Jason from Friday the 13th, falling under Mezco’s ‘Cinema of Fear’ collection. His unique deco will include a greener, grave-fresh, mouldering skin tone, as well as a series of ‘Freddy vs. Jason’ slash marks across his battle-damaged mask (though, cleverly, without explicity saying so). He also has 12 points of articulation under his fabric costume, will cost $30 at NYCC, and is limited to 666 units - for obvious reasons.

It took every ounce of restaint that I had to not dart around the offices, excitedly panting “What’s this? And what’s that? Can I touch this? That’s awesome! I have that! WHAT’S THAT OVER THERE?” Scrabble boards, swords laying across chairs, a TV hooked up to video game consoles and comfortable couches belied the attitude of the company - love what you do, love what you make, but take some time to really enjoy it too. I didn’t really expect to find out exactly what the swords were for, but before the visit was over, Mike Drake would make it very clear to me.

Before I made the journey to Mezco, I took questions from a handful of fans to communicate to Mike Drake, all of which were answered - as well as a whole bunch of little along-the-way, exclusive, never-before-revealed tidbits that we gleaned. Stay tuned for Saturday, where all will be revealed!

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Article Tags: action figures, Hellboy, Heroes, Living Dead Dolls, Mezco, toys

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 2:00 am and is filed under collecting fyi, events. 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.