Marusan had a good show at DesignerCon. Several figures sold out, but the remainder will be for sale at Monster Patrol's store in Little Tokyo. They will be up for sale on their web site starting December 1: https://monsterpatroltoys.com/ 2023 is going to be Marusan's 100th anniversary! Kaminaga-san has some fun stuff planned.
The Marusan toys from DesignerCon are up at Monster Patrol: https://monsterpatroltoys.com/collections/exclusive
Thanks for the heads-up! Wow, there's still a really good selection. @Roger- in your previous post, is the 'King Godras' on the right (dark brown) the vintage figure?
No, the brown one is also a 30cm shrinky-dink reissue that was sold at Five Points. The original toy was 40cm.
There was a glitter Red King like that at the show. I didn't realize they still had any 450 size toys to sell aside from Kanegon and King Godras.
I wish the clear lavendar glitter fellas were a tad cheaper. Pretty but spendy. I did snag a Baron - two headed old time charm!
Oh that's right, the original was a jumbo size. Thanks. I thought the one in your photo looked smaller than the GID, but it's probably an optical illusion.
So I bought 2 figures from Monster Patrol (a 350 and 450). They shipped to me in a large box with zero packing material. Somehow the figures were ok (possibly because they are effectively double-bagged), but yikes guys.
I didn't contact them. In the past I would, but to be honest, I didn't find it worthwhile unless there was actual damage to the toy. The sellers either wouldn't answer or would send some sort of half-hearted apology. These days, I just make a mental note and maybe post about it so that others are aware that the default padding option is 'minimal/none'. In this case, I was just surprised that a store would ship 2 large, expensive toys with no packing material (aside from the double bag). If others order from them, they may want to request 'extra' packing material.
Hey gang. So I noticed the Bullmark site has been down for a few weeks. Since the pandemic when they were doing so many releases direct I’ve been obsessively checking the site. But over the course of the year there’s been less and less available on the site and it appears that once the stock was depleted the site went dead. I suppose there’s still store exclusives happening but does anyone know the deal? I’ve always had better luck ordering through the site via proxy than trying to snag those store exclusives.
I emailed Kaminaga-san at Marusan about this, he says that Ishizuki-san and Bullmark are fine, but Ishizuki decided to close down his web store. He feels that there are already retail and mail order outlets like Hakaba Gallery and Hashimoto Gangu that do a good job of getting his products out there so the web store isn't needed.
Thanks for that! Still feels like a bummer tho. I’m going to miss obsessively visiting the site waiting for new toys to appear. never had much luck getting stuff from those stores either. Damn.
Yeah, the only time I've ever bought a Bullmark reissue was through Hakaba Gallery in Tokyo, and when they appeared at Five Points. If I learn about any additional outlets I'll post it here.
Thanks for the update, @Roger. Was wondering about the Bullmark site myself. I'm familiar with Hashimoto but not Hakaba Gallery. Is this Hakaba?
Yes, that's the Hakaba (Graveyard) Gallery online store. They do ship overseas, but I don't know what the rates are like. I also want to point out that Quang Le released the first official Bullmark US exclusive this year, the Kanegon with the Creature Bazaar t-shirt. Before that, they were doing officially licensed products like the rug and socks. There is an opportunity for Quang or someone else to start distributing more products stateside, we'll see.
FWIW, my experience with Hakaba/Graveyard's proxy buying partner: not good for limited Bullmark releases. What I attempted to buy was sold out long before they (manually?) initiated the purchase process, something like 24 hours later. My side of the order was placed during Hakaba business hours.
I’ve heard nothing good about peeps in the US attempting to get goods from them. I have to admit to thinking that perhaps that closing the site was a way to avoid dealing with proxy services/foreigners. Roger I emailed Quang first to inquire with him but never heard back. Hopefully the Kanegon ( or socks) was the beginning of a long fruitful relationship. I had that Kanegon in my cart but it sold out as I was attempting to buy it .
Yeah, I actually had that Kanegon in my hand and neglected to buy it, which was pretty stupid because (as you can probably tell) I love anything that pays homage to the original Baragon. It's okay, I saw someone post a photo of it for sale at CoCoo for something like 30,000.