“Life is complicated and hard enough. To find little moments of joy in whatever form you can is OK. It’s really OK to be a grown-up nerd! It’s 100 percent healthy and great.”
This is Super7’s Dora Drimalas discussing what it’s like to be a collector, and how pop-culture nostalgia tends to get us right in the feels. The co-owner of the toy company is doing so while seated beside co-founder, and husband, Brian Flynn from a corner of their San Francisco offices, specifically in front of a towering shelving unit full of neon action figures from the kids cartoon Toxic Crusaders, a Halloween mask based on hardcore band Gorilla Biscuits, Universal Monsters bubble-bath dispensers and more.
Flynn is wearing a Creature of the Black Lagoon sweatshirt; they’re both handling their vibrantly colored ReAction Figures throughout their talk with us. And that’s just scratching the surface in terms of the cultural touchstones and “connective tissue” Super7 is working with these days.
“The fabric that makes up each individual is slightly different,” Drimalas suggests of that breadth. “You could be early goth, Charlie Brown and a little bit of Slayer’s minotaur.”
Surely, it takes a special visionary to imagine a world where Snoopy and G.I. Joe figures naturally coexist with Slayer and King Diamond collectibles — and it’s even wilder to build out an entire company based around that culture-jamming dream. But that’s exactly what Flynn and Drimalas have done. So how did this pair of metal-and-hardcore-loving design stars turn their childhood passion for pop-culture toys into one of the premier companies in the music collectible space? For Super7’s dynamic duo, it’s all about embracing, and celebrating, their geekiness.
“We’re speaking to the die-hard fans,” says Drimalas. “They know that’s who we’re going to take care of. We’re going to make the nerdiest of the nerdy version of something for the collectors.”
That fan spirit, not to mention a restless creative drive, was baked into both Flynn and Drimalas pretty young. The pair met in the early Nineties while studying at the University of North Texas. Drimalas was a Metallica-loving film student from Houston who was drawn to vintage design books and Super 8 film cameras. Flynn also grew up in Texas but spent his teen years in Tampa, Florida, designing demo covers for hardcore bands — before returning to the Lonestar State to enroll in UNT’s design program.
Drimalas recalls being wowed by Flynn’s dorm room full of monster toys, comic books and hardcore EPs. They connected immediately. Not long after that, Drimalas switched majors from film to design.
After graduation, they moved out to Portland, Oregon, to work on various outside-of-the-box branding campaigns for Nike — including Drimalas designing a themed putt-putt golf course to introduce Tiger Woods to Japan. Flynn was keeping his design skills sharp in the worlds of big business and DIY punk, whether creating the logo for Major League Soccer or while helping craft record layouts for riot grrrl bands like Team Dresch.
Both note that a go-big-or-go-home mentality was instilled into them while working at Nike, something that has transferred over to the fun and fearless, pop-culture-clashing whimsy of Super7. They next moved to San Francisco in 2000, where they started up their Hybrid-Design firm, which they still run. Super7 began the following year as an offshoot magazine celebrating kaiju toy culture. The pivot to toy manufacturing arrived through an early issue that included a coupon for an exclusive monster collectible.
To figure out the mechanics of toy production, Flynn reached out to the Japanese sculptors of the vinyl monster toys he’d been obsessed with. Super7’s first figure ended up being a translucent gray Godzilla; next up was Flynn’s imagined “meltdown” version of the villainous smog monster Hedorah, in an irregularly off-brand translucent orange colorway. When the OG designers asked him why he wanted to press up such an unusual variant, he simply answered, “Because it looks cool as hell!”
Super7 got their start in music-themed merchandising a few years later through a fittingly cartoonish, kaiju-like figure of the great hoodied ape that adorns the front cover of NYHC youth crew group Gorilla Biscuits’ 1988 self-titled 7-inch. The figure sold successfully, leading to reprints in colorways inspired by the EP’s various vinyl pressings through Revelation Records, as well as a similarly simian line of plastic masks. On the surface this might seem like unconventional merchandising for Gorilla Biscuits, but Flynn’s quick to point out that action figures had already been ingrained in hardcore decades before Super7 ever hit the scene.
“There’s a huge history of toy collectors within punk: Tesco Vee from the Meatmen, Glenn Danzig, Tim Kerr from the Big Boys,” Flynn explains. “When you get into Revelation Records, they used to include flyers in the early releases where they said they would trade rare pressings for G.I. Joe or Batman toys. When we reached out to do the Gorilla Biscuits figure, I knew [vocalist Anthony] Civ [Civarelli] collected G.I. Joe, so I thought they’d get it. Obviously, they did.”
Some Super7 tributes are givens. The earliest music-minded ReAction Figures were varying forms of Iron Maiden mascot Eddie — from his Somewhere in Time-era, sci-fi bounty-hunter guise to an “Aces High”-style war pilot. Misfits’ cloaked Fiend is a steady presence in the line, whether molded in an on-point black cloak, or covered in glitter-sparkled canary yellow plastic.
Other character choices, while icons in their own right, are deeper cuts for metal collectors. Take their jean-jacketed figure of early Exodus vocalist Paul Baloff, who few could have guessed would be bonded in plastic 40 years on from the dawn of ’80s thrash.
“He’s one of those unsung heroes of the early thrash-metal scene. And if you talk to anybody that actually lived here in the Bay Area, he was the fulcrum. Metallica became the biggest [band], but Paul Baloff was the king of the scene,” Flynn explains of the singer, who died in 2002.
Super7 notably went all-in with their figure, even printing up a commemorative zine that saluted both Baloff and early DIY metal publications. “Metal Mania made a specific Cliff Burton memoriam issue after he died [in 1986], reprinting an old interview that they had done with him as a tribute. Paul died a few years later; [he] didn’t get his Metal Mania tribute, so we made one!”
It generally takes a year for Super7 toys to move from the development stage onto store shelves, with that process including sculpting time and the legalities around marketing someone’s likeness — whether that’s for an ’80s cartoon property, or a flesh-and-blood metal yeller. “It’s still licensing in the same way,” Flynn confirms. “You’re taking this intellectual property, like using King Diamond’s face, this makeup combination, and his top hat… [so,] the process is no different, whether it’s ThunderCats or someone from real life.”
Distilling the essences of these titans into a retro-style 3.75-inch ReAction Figure, however, is no small feat. And when Flynn is speaking with the iconic metalheads he’s about to immortalize for the toy world — in a format no bigger than the original late-Seventies wave of Kenner Star Wars figures — the Super7 co-founder reveals it’s sometimes an exercise in managing expectations off the production line.
“They’re thinking about themselves life-sized, but we’re like, ‘You’re not even four inches tall!’” he explains. “There’s only so much detail we can get at this scale. It’s usually trying to get [the musicians] to understand the limitations of what we can do, and what would be appropriate.”
Even so, it’s hard to deny the incredible eye for detail brought to each Super7 project. For their wave of King Diamond figures, for instance, the Danish frontman’s diminutive plastic doppelgangers arrived in an array of variants featuring era-appropriate corpse paint and other accoutrements — from the cape and bony crucifix mic of Mercyful Fate’s Melissa days to the King’s modern top-hat era.
“King was a little nervous about it,” Flynn reveals of their initial collaboration. “He grew up in Europe and didn’t have toys like this when he was a kid. He didn’t really understand it [at first], but he was like, ‘Alright… let’s give it a shot.’ Once the first ones came out and he saw how much the fans reacted to it, he was like, ‘What’s next? What about ‘Grandma’?’ He’s been wonderful.”
An awesomely absurdist throughline likewise connects the various musical properties Flynn and Drimalas are producing at Super7. With dozens of options to choose from, ambitious collectors could set up a display-case concert where Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx and shaggy Muppets drummer Animal are jamming in front of a crowd of guts-eviscerated zombie punks from 1985 horror-comedy Return of the Living Dead.
Super7 also produce extra-large ULTIMATES! figures with multiple points of articulation and interchangeable head molds; Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, Ghost’s Papa Emeritus IV and Cliff Burton have all received the ULTIMATES! treatment. And while somewhat secretive over what’s coming up next through their various lines, Flynn and Drimalas can at least confirm that this year they’re finally putting out a long-planned ReAction Figure for towering Type O Negative frontman Peter Steele.
There’s likewise an extra level of metal attentiveness to bringing the hyper-real portraiture style of painter Ed Repka onto the cardbacks for a slew of ReAction Figures — further connecting Super7 to a lineage of landmark album covers the visual artist made for Megadeth, Death and more. “We’re getting to write ourselves into part of this band’s history — albeit very small and in the corner,” Flynn sums up of bringing Super7 into a broader heavy-music continuum.
From surefire sellers to the most niche of properties, the toymakers at Super7 are still wowed by pulling waves of ReAction Figures out of their molds. On another level, their drive taps into the inherent thrill of collecting something, and “not being ashamed of the things you love.” That goes for crate-digging for a first-press vinyl, to nabbing a pennant at a ball game, to picking up a Super7 figure.
While mass-marketed, finding the right collectible can be a highly personal pursuit that taps into our core memories, and, deeper still, our sense of self. Because what seems likes goofy ephemera to one person could be inspirational lifeblood to another. So why not stand up a lil’ Lemmy toy, or one of Super7’s ghoulish Papa Emeritus figures on the shelf by your record player? After all, they look cool as hell.