Pics from Touma! Touma! Touma! @ mixi-bang (12.10)

Touma’s 1st US show opened this past Saturday night at mixi-bang! in Pasadena.  About 50 people lined up for the Touma! Touma! Touma! show.  The main attractions were two show exclusives: an all clear-blue Skuttle (50 pieces @ $75 each) and a GID Bone Aniballoon (~100 pices (of 200) @ $60 each).  The doors opened around 7:15 or so, the first ten people were let inside and then after that people were allowed to enter only as others left.  Francine and I waited close to an hour to get in (#11 and #12) — kinda agonizing but well worth it; a total of about 3.5 hours in line. The mixi-bang! staff worked to keep things moving along, including offering to open up bags/boxes for the customer to speed up the signing process — a nice and much-appreciated  touch.    As is always the case, Touma took time to not only sign but draw illustrations on each toy customers purchased.   

Beyond the show exclusives, there were 8 custom aniballoons done by MAD, Nakanari, Bloo Empire, Tim Biskup, Gary Baseman,Tokidoki and Joe Ledbetter and a custom painting by David Horvath.  Several of these customs were in the 300 to 500 dollar range which is perhaps slightly on the low side.  Both of Tim Biksup’s customs were incredible and Joe Ledbetter’s piece was quite inventive turning the "nose" into a tongue!

Additionally, Touma had several custom Aniballoons — some of which had amazing paint schemes, so smooth and delicious.  Speaking of customs, he also had 4 or 5 hand-made Wolfs which were pretty sweet.  Continuing on the hand-made tip, there were also sets of 3 hand-made baboos for I believe $375.  Additionally, Touma was offering several limited edition prints at quite reasonable prices (don’t remember the exact pricing).

Oh… and there was a prototype of Goon, Touma’s dragon toy coming from Wonderwall in April of ’06.  I’m really looking forward to this one.

Finally, there was an all black Hell Hound and several regular edition Aniballoons!  So much stuff and precious little green to go around 😉 

We had a great time staring at everything and getting our toys signed by Touma himself.  Artitsts and notables seen at the event included Tim Biskup, Gary Baseman, Joe Ledbetter, Paul of CircusPunks fame and of course Touma.  Props to Touma, the participating artists, and the very cool mixi-bang staff for pulling together such a fun event.   Btw, there are tons of pictures after the "fold" — bandwidth intensive!