Dagger wears platform boots, scowls from beneath his long black hair and never eats his vegetables. Casual Storm's pigtails hang down past the waist of her torn dress. Morbida has the forlorn look of Lillian Munster on a sunny summer afternoon.
All of these gloomy characters are just 17cm to 30cm tall, even in platform boots. They are the Bleeding Edge Goths, action figures dreamed up by Steve Varner, a longtime figure designer, with help from his 16-year-old son, Stefan, and a few of the Goth-influenced artists who populate Varner's studio in Torrance, California.
The Goth culture, which emerged around 1980 around bands like Bauhaus, was in part a reaction to the sunny materialism of the Reagan era. Goths, who borrow some elements from the Gothic literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, are known for their black clothing, piercings, dyed hair, fishnet stockings and taste for macabre literature and brooding music with depressing lyrics.
Varner's 14 Goth characters are different from other figures on the market because they do not depict comic book or film characters, like the X-Men, or even anyone in particular. Instead, Varner wanted to capture a real subculture, albeit one that can be a bit cartoonish. Only a few other figures on the market try to represent a subculture with unknown characters.
David Gonzales has done it with his successful Homies, which he has described as Chicano buddies from East Los Angeles, figures that have moved from gumball machines to toy stores and have sold more than 100 million units. The Mullet Heads, 1980s figures with mullet haircuts from Achy Breaky Toys, and the Mini Moshers, punk rockers from the Stronghold Group, are other such figures. But since they were introduced last summer, Varner's Gothic figures have been among the more successful products, retailers who carry them say.
Bleeding Edge Goths are sold by Tower Records, Hot Topic and Spencer Gifts, among other retailers, and are available in Europe and Australia as well as the US.
Melodi Ramquist, a buyer for Hot Topic, a chain of more than 400 stores that carry clothing and accessories for teenagers, said Varner's figures had sold better than she had expected. Tower reported selling 85 percent of its first shipment of two types of the figures. After a first production run of nearly 80,000 figures, Varner is shipping a second group of about the same size, which includes some new characters, and he says he expects to turn a profit on it. He is planning to ship a third group in the second half of this year.
Varner, who founded his figure design business, Varner Studios, in 1979, designs for companies like Walt Disney, McDonald's and the Warner Brothers Entertainment unit of Time Warner. But after nearly a quarter-century of designing for others, he found that he was tired of the negotiations and bureaucracy that accompanied contracts with major clients. Although he has continued to work for big companies on figures including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe and Tony Hawk, he also began creating figures of his own -- figures that were not likely to be found in a Happy Meal.
In the fall of 2002, Varner and Stefan, who often helps in the studio, went to a meeting about licensing the rights to the likenesses of Latino rock stars. Afterward, Varner asked Stefan what he thought.
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