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Meet the Maker

Jeremy Madl left Kansas, started creating some of the coolest stuff in the world, and then came home.

By Nadia Pflaum 

It's been two years since he moved into the house at the end of the cul-de-sac, but Jeremy Madl is still a mystery to his neighbors in suburban Overland Park. From the windows of their neutral-colored houses with basketball goals in the driveways, they peer at him — a 30-something guy dashing out each morning to his white Toyota Scion XB, dressed like a teenager in baggy calf-grazing shorts, an ever-present baseball cap and shell-toed Adidas. Tattoos crawl out from beneath the sleeves of his T-shirts. His neighbors know he has kids and a wife. They know he must be employed somewhere.

The neighbors probably don't know that Madl is internationally famous. People in the United Kingdom ask for his autograph, factories in China await his command and fans on Internet forums analyze his work to predict his next move. Still, even some of Madl's biggest devotees wouldn't know him if he stood next to them in line at Target.

Lured by MySpace bulletins and blog posts, his admirers gathered at Phenom, the boutique streetwear store at 1521 Grand. There, one day last spring, a few giddy fans clutched red-and-white boxes of Madl's creations while he sat, amid shelves of Day-Glo sneakers, with a permanent marker, signing his name.

Madl makes toys.

His designs appear on molded hunks of PVC, manufactured in Hong Kong in limited batches and sold to collectors for $5 to $500 each.

Behind Madl hangs a print of one of his most recognizable characters, the Modern Hero: a leaping skeleton with a row of gold-capped teeth and wearing a chunky gold dollar-sign necklace, Mickey Mouse-style trousers and puffy white gloves, one hand gripping a fire-spewing spray-paint can. Scattered on the walls are prints of Madl's anthropomorphic monkeys, scary clowns and sulky kids with jackets pulled high and hats pulled low so that only their eyes are visible.

The toys sold at Phenom come in "blind" boxes, so there's some mystery as to which design a buyer will get. The side of the box shows all of a toy's possible patterns; numbers on the box indicate how many toys were made in each design, allowing the buyer to figure out how rare the toy is. Extremely limited runs of "chase" toys appear in each batch, and the laws of supply and demand apply: The rarest toys are the most valuable.

For the fans who have shown up to see him, Madl does something special: He tears into the wholesale boxes of 24 blind-boxed toys and, as if by magic, points out where the valuable chase toys are hidden.

Though these toys have the most potential to increase in value, true vinyl-toy fans won't sell.

This fall, Kid Robot, which might be the world's most famous designer-toy company, with hubs in New York and California, tapped Madl and 19 other artists to design paint schemes for toys in the company's fourth Dunny series, a line of 3-inch-tall toys with silhouettes that resemble cartoon rabbits.

Series Four debuted at the end of September. Phenom sold out of its entire allotment — four boxes of 24 Dunnys, 96 pieces in all, $7 per piece — in four days. One repeat buyer told Phenom owner Clint Miller that buying the toys was addictive, "like crack."

Toymakers such as Kid Robot bank on the compulsions that their products inspire.

At the beginning of October, Kid Robot flew Madl to Toronto for the grand opening of Circa, a five-story bar created by nightclub entrepreneur Peter Gatien. An entire floor is dedicated to Kid Robot's designs.

Madl says the designers in the crowd were the ones in jeans and T-shirts, conspicuous among the glam club kids and Armani-clad businessmen with their trophy girlfriends.

The company's themed room featured giant-sized versions of Frank Kozik's Smorkin' Labbit toys — bunnies with five o'clock shadows puffing on cigarettes — that clubgoers could use as chairs. The cocktail tables lit up when people set their drinks on them, flashing Dunny silhouettes that moved in dizzying sequence in different colors. There was a 10-foot-tall Dunny made of chalkboard material for artists to draw on. Women wore wigs that matched their primary-colored outfits — perfect for marking with Day-Glo paints. The men's and women's bathrooms were connected by a long shower stall, in case someone was moved to freshen up in front of an audience.

Madl showed up in shorts and Adidas, his hair freshly cut beneath a new hat, sporting a shirt he'd made for the event. He drank Red Bull and vodkas and wandered through the rooms, greeting old friends from the art scene and shaking hands with Justin Timberlake, who reportedly paid $10,000 for a room at Circa that night.

Madl was in bed by 2 a.m.

Madl grew up near 92nd Street in Lenexa, playing with Legos and worshipping Star Wars. He went to Shawnee Mission schools and split his time between his mom's place in the suburbs and his dad's big-city-seeming digs near the River Market.

Madl figured that he'd study illustration or graphic design in college. He was always doodling. (He still carries around a small black sketchbook and blankets a fresh page with inked ideas each day.) His friends were into graffiti, and Madl's doodling was influenced by their styles, but after watching his buddies get beat up or arrested for tagging, he decided he'd prefer to focus on school. He pored over urban art spreads in Japanese magazines, captioned with a language he couldn't read. At the time, he didn't know the history. Now he does.

By all accounts, a Hong Kong artist named Michael Lau started the designer-toy movement. At an art show in 1997, Lau displayed a collection of 101 G.I. Joe toys that he'd modified to look like his friends and neighbors — skateboard kids, graphic designers, urban B-boys. Lau went on to design a line of coveted toys, then Nike sneakers, then ad campaigns for brands such as Levi's.

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