Comics to toys to games to animation.

We do it ourselves! (The cartoons are in the works, and they're going to be Good!)

But helping other small creators do this is absolutely the dream.

We make toys, and we make them cheap.

(We, in this case being me and sundog and my wife and @MannycartoonStudio and Wanda-Sue and occasionally a few other people, working under the name @MountainTownToys)

I sell little rubber toys (made from industrial byproducts and leftovers from industrial manufacturing, mostly) and little action figures (made with a blend of new plastics and plastics recycled from our cafe) and they are, mostly, inexpensive.

But expensive is relative, cheap is relative.

Our little rubber toys are $6. The closest toy from a major manufacturer would be the Super 7 Keshi Surprise blind boxes, and those are also $6 or sometimes slightly more. The closest toys from indie manufacturers tend to be $10 (and either fundamentally worse because they are actually resin cast, or produced in much larger quantities than ours to take advantage of economies of scale that we haven't tried to approach yet.)

Our jointed action figures are mostly $20, which is roughly the same price as a Reaction figure from Super 7 (which is considered an "expensive" figure in the mainstream toy world, for what it is) and also roughly the same price as the smaller jointed figures produced in the GLYOS corners of the art toy world.

There are certainly cheaper toys out there, but there are also significantly more expensive toys that aren't, on a technical level at least, any better than ours.

Anyway, we still have some stuff to figure out before I can be confident that we'll be able to keep making toys indefinitely.

The biggest thing is one remaining production hurdle that I hope to resolve in the next three weeks.

After that, it's distribution, marketing, and logistics.

Who will sell our toys, who will buy our toys, how we will get our toys to those people?