Written by Jonathan Wojcik

   A product of George and Ayleen Gaspar's October Toys, the Outlandish Mini-Figure Guys first debuted in 2012, featuring five different characters designed by five different artists, chosen out of countless submissions by community vote, and like a lot of great things these days, entirely fan-funded via kickstarter. Taking after classic mini-figure lines like M.U.S.C.L.E. and Monster in my Pocket, the explosive popularity of O.M.F.G. took the toy hobby by storm, facilitating the production of two more series, a fourth on the horizon and hopefully many more to come.

  It really is amazing just how long it took for us consumers to have so much influence in what products we actually get to consume, from potentially world-shaping inventions to tiny, plastic toys, and it's only through this process, with the sculpting talents of George Gaspar and the support of the October Toys forums, that I've finally realized one of my childhood dreams.

   If you've somehow missed what a good 70% of this website seems to revolve around, I've been a consistently avid toy collector my entire life, and my absolute favorites are often the smallest, simplest, goofiest little hunks of plastic on the market; the kind you might get out of a particularly nice vending machine, or the golden years of cereal boxes. As a child, I would spend whole afternoons carefully planning out the toy lines of my dreams, even attempting on more than one occasion to mail my crude, magic-marker ideas to real companies.

   Thus, it's not without a downright surreal feeling and inordinate amount of excitement that, for the first time, I can showcase a mass produced monster figure that I actually designed, and it's in great company, too. Obviously, any company that includes a tentacled garbage can qualifies as "great" to some degree.

   I submitted several designs of my own for consideration in O.M.F.G. Series 3, but it was Dr. Decay here that everybody seemed to take a shining to. After George sculpted a dead-on perfect figure prototype, the votes started rolling in and the Doctor secured a spot in the top five character submissions!

  Originally conceived as a non-player character for the Mortasheen role-playing game, Decay is a fungus-encrusted cadaver who studies the beneficial - and not-so beneficial - organisms inhabiting the bodies of his fellow zombies, every undead an ecosystem of its own! I can still promise truthfully that work on the game is steadily progressing, but in the meantime, it already has a mini-figure tie-in!

   Series 3 is set to ship this very month, and soon after, I'll be selling little Dr. Decays right here on Bogleech in an exclusive color limited to only a couple hundred pieces! What color will it be!? EVEN I DON'T KNOW.

   I can't tell you how long I wanted something exactly like this to occur, and how long it's still taking to sink in. It's one small, sculpted hunk of rubber out of many, but it's a small, sculpted hunk of rubber based on my own imagination, and it was on display at Comic-Con. And at toy fairs. And people are going to be video reviewing it and trying to collect every possible variation on it and repainting and modifying it and it's all just too weird in the best possible way for anything to be too much of anything.

If you participated in the series 3 Kickstarter, you'll be getting your stuff in the coming weeks. Otherwise, keep checking octobertoys.com!