In a chat with IGN at New York Comic Con over the weekend, Todd McFarlane dropped the hugely exciting news that he’s looking to bring McFarlane Toys back to its roots, selling direct to consumers and re-animating some of the company’s popular toy lines from the past. Most notably, McFarlane is planning on reviving the kickass “Movie Maniacs” action figure line, and that news totally dominated the conversation when it came to reporting on McFarlane’s comments. Rightfully so, but there was another awesome bit in that same interview.
McFarlane also wants to bring back “Clive Barker’s Tortured Souls,“ an action figure line that kicked off in 2001 and featured crazy cool, gruesome toys designed by Barker!
“We live in a brave new world now where you can go literally from production to the consumer, right? You can cut out all the middle men and we’re seeing that with Kickstarters and people doing direct, you know, dot com,” McFarlane told IGN at NYCC. “So what we’re gonna do is, when we started McFarlane Toys twenty-plus years ago, we were built on the detailed stuff, doing all these cool monsters and all this sort of wicked stuff. Unfortunately, the stores we were selling to at that point, like Tower Records and Suncoast and Babbage’s and KB Toys, and all these other ones, they’ve all fallen to the wayside.”
He continued, “So we’re gonna go back to our origins and we’re gonna go, hey, for all you people who like Tortured Souls? There’s gonna be more. For all you people who like some of the Movie Maniacs? There’s gonna be more. But even the new — the stuff we just created, like Dragons? More. Spawn? More. Twisted Tales? More. All the crazy stuff that we used to sell that we can’t because people just want brands now, the stores, I go so don’t worry about it. We’ll just sell it directly to you, the consumer. So that’s gonna be a big push for us.”
Check out the original “Tortured Souls” below, which essentially fused Hellraiser and Nightbreed!
