Mark Nagata is a Renaissance man. He just might have the largest Ultraman collection in the world. As a designer and artist, he’s worked for the likes of DC Comics, LucasArts, and Hasbro. For several years, he published Super 7, a magazine focused on Japanese vinyl toys, before going on to start the Max Toy Company, designing and manufacturing vinyl art toys. On top of all this, he’s a tremendously nice guy!
Jedd-the-Jedi had a chance to sit down with Mark at STGCC. In the first part of their conversation, they spanned toy collecting, the differences between working for the big guys vs. running your own show, and if it’s alright to play with your art toys. It’s really a fantastic interview. Read on!
Jedd: Hi Mark, great to be talking to a fellow lover of toys. First off, what got you into collecting toys? You wrote on your site “I think it’s safe to say that most of us collect because of our childhoods,” so do you have any childhood memories of a particular toy or action figure that you want to share?
Mark Nagata: Oh boy, for sure. Well I think the first impression I had for Japanese toys is when I was about 9 years old, and I had an aunt who was living in Japan, and for Christmas she sent a very big box to me, and inside were about 20 different Japanese toys. So Henshen cyborgs, Bullmark figures, kaiju toys… but at the time, I didn’t know that’s what they were called. To sort of back up a little, I’m third generation Japanese American, so my parents were born in America and my grandparents came from Japan to America, but me being third generation, actually I don’t understand Japanese and I don’t speak Japanese, so when I got this box of toys, I couldn’t read anything except for the company name Bullmark, ‘cause it was printed in English. I didn’t know the names of the characters, I didn’t know that they had TV shows; I just thought they were toys.
So, from that point, it was really… I fell in love with the visual part of the toys. The way it looked, the packaging, because all the packaging had like very dynamic artwork and colours, very crazy colours, and all the kaiju for me… were just… I couldn’t even put into words what it did to my imagination. Because at that point, my toys in America were GI JOE 12 inch, Major Matt Mason, so very… 60s, 70s types of toys, but um very plain, based on like a real astronaut, or an army man. No imagination, right?
So when I opened that box, and I saw these crazy colours, and these kaiju and these spacemen, I was like… you know, what is this? I haven’t seen this before. So when I look back all these years, that’s the point that started me on this journey to this day, which is being able to make actual kaiju toys in Japan.
Continue reading “STGCC 2012: Interview with Max Toy Co’s Mark Nagata – Part One”
