Sun, Feb 15, 2004 page12

• Morbid dolls shrink-wrap a brooding subculture

  After nearly a quarter-century of designing for others, Steve Varner took the advice of his 16-year-old son, and now he is making millions of dollars from action figures that are unlikely to be found in a Happy Meal

  • By Jim Rendon / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  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.

  

  Steve Varner, the inventor of the action figures called Bleeding Edge Goths, with one of his dolls in his Torrance, California, studio, where he is assisted by his 16-year-old son and a few other dyed-hair, goth-influenced artists.

  PHOTO: NY TIMES

  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.

  Stefan was bored stiff with the rock-star concept, Varner said.

  "He told me, `If you want to do something, Dad, you should do Goth figures.'"

  Varner said he loved the idea. "I started looking around and began seeing how many Goths there were," he said. "These people were not being represented, and they were all potential customers."

  Although Varner, 52, was already an adult when the Goth trend began, he has been employing art students influenced by the Goth subculture in his studio. "It was right in front of my face and I didn't see it," he said.

  While the popularity of Goth culture has waxed and waned, Goths have been a continuing market, Ramquist said, and the Hot Topic stores have always carried Goth merchandise, including tall black boots and long black overcoats. Tower Records also caters to Goth tastes, said Kevin Winnik, its director of merchandising.

  In a Tower store in Manhattan, the Bleeding Edge Goth figures are stocked next to Living Dead dolls from Mezco Toyz, LLC Figures from the films of the director Tim Burton are on display, and a Misfits black lunchbox, shaped like a coffin, is propped up on the bottom shelf. Goth culture is shrink-wrapped and for sale.

  Winnik said he was aware that such commercialization of a subculture had the potential to alienate the very people whom retailers were trying to attract. And with the images of platform boots and Count Dracula garb, Goth may be as easy to mock as it is to exploit.

  Varner said he rejected any design suggestions that smacked of ridicule. "I tried to be very respectful of their culture, to show the beauty of it and not poke fun of them in any way," he said.

  Varner, who has 12 full-time employees and eight freelancers with whom he works regularly, did this in part by appointing someone familiar with Goth culture, Beth Colla, to run the project. Colla, who frequents Hollywood's Goth clubs and formerly produced a line of Goth makeup, worked with Varner's artists to develop the designs.

  "Goths are really awesome people," she said. "I did not want to take their culture and wreck it for them. I felt like I was representing a culture that has not been represented in a toy or comic before."

  Winnik, who says Varner has succeeded at this goal, chose to carry the Bleeding Edge Goths partly because they speak to Goths without putting them off.

  But as Varner knows, starting a successful line of figures is hardly simple.

  According to the NPD Group Inc, a consumer market research firm, the action figure market is worth US$1.2 billion to US$1.4 billion a year. It is driven by large corporations like Hasbro, which created the Transformers, and Bandai America Inc, a unit of the Bandai Co, with its Power Rangers.

  The release of an action-figure-intensive film can bolster the entire market by 10 percent or more, as was the case with Star Wars Episode II -- Attack of the Clones in 2002, said Michael Redmond, a senior analyst at NPD.

  Large corporations, however, generally do not try to offer figures that are not born with a mass-culture identity. "It is hard for a big company to get behind the idea of toys that are not based on characters that are easy to sell in advertising or films," said Zach Oat, editor of ToyFare magazine, which caters to action-figure collectors. "The last time they did that was 40 years ago with Barbie and G.I. Joe."

  Varner had no desire to do battle with the Mattels of the world. He was looking for a niche in the smaller market of collectible figures, which appeal to people in their late teens to mid-20's and make up 15 percent to 20 percent of the total market, according to NPD.

  The success of Varner's products may lead other small companies to start lines of subculture figures, Oat said.

  "People are starting to see that action figures don't necessarily have to be about a character in a movie or a cartoon," he said. "Toys can be about fashion or lifestyle and that can appeal to a broader audience."
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