Monster Kolor announcement!

[Sanjeev]

Hey guys! I hate to sound like a spammer with this posting, but I wanted to spread the word about Matt "" Walker's new toy website called .

The site is kinda geared towards vinyl kaiju toy painters, but he wants it to be strictly open to absolutely anyone who's interested in painting toys of all kinds, modifying toys and showing folks how they did it, resin-casting, scratch-building...basically being creative in ANY way with any sort of toys!

It's a Ning site, so folks get their own "social networking" style homepage where they can post pics and videos, but I think the bread-n-butter will be .

Matt tells me that he doesn't want the site to have ONE bit of toy snobbery in the slightest. If people want to modify ANY toy they want, by all means, bring it. That means dumb urban vinyls (hey, HE may be unbiased...I'M not!), action figures, Japanese vinyls, Transformers...probably even vintage stuff (eep). At the same time, though, he wants the discussions to be robust and critical...no lame one- or two-word (or all-smiley) posts. He wants it to be a legit place for artists to hang out, learn how to use tools they may not have used before, show their stuff off, get useful feedback...all that...REGARDLESS of what your "canvas" is.

No hipster snobbery. No designer vinyl guys disrespecting kaiju character toy fans. No hate or exclusivity. Just content. Sounds pretty cool to me.

Oh, one other important thing: he does NOT want any sort of marketplace. Many of us have seen the crap-show that erupts around the market and "custom" toys. The last thing Matt wants is for supposedly "big name" customizers out there to use his site to advertise their $8 toys they're trying to sell for $800. No posting things for sale--in fact, he prefers people NOT just post final pics of stuff they've done anyway. It's more useful for others to see in-progress pics so ideas can be exchanged. Anyway, if someone wants to PM someone else to commission a custom toy privately, that's fine...just keep that stuff off the board.

Again, it's going to be pretty kaiju-centric for a while. He selling his own through the site, which are obviously aimed at the airbrush guys out there...but like I said, he wants anyone doing *anything* creative with toys to join up and hang out.

He's not trying to have his site compete with Monster Zero or anyone else's forum...he's just trying to make a special spot for creativity to complement the sites like this that are out there now. There's already tons of custom kaiju fans from skullbrain over there.

Matt asked me to spread the word, so that's what I'm doing. Hell, even if you're just a *fan* of custom toys or are just interested in seeing what such folks are doing, join up and hang out. Collecting buzz is at an all-time high these days...but there's also a critical mass that seems to be gathering around people who want to push the hobby past consumption and into something more productive.

It'll be interesting to see what Monster Kolor blossoms into...and it'll be cool for us mainly-character-vinyl guys to influence that direction...