Meet the Maker

Sneed didn't realize how well-known Madl was until friends of his from the Kansas City Art Institute geeked out at the news of Sneed's internship. They gushed over how cool it must be, asked what Madl is like. Sneed told them that he appreciated Madl's humility.

"I can't stand dealing with dicks, and I'm not the type of person who will bite my tongue for the sake of getting somewhere," Sneed says. "So if he was the type of person to be like, I'm the dopest person on planet Earth, and you should feel lucky that you get to be in the same room with me, I couldn't deal with it. But dude is just, like, mad cool. I'm working from, like, 10:30 till, like, 6 but I'm having fun the whole time, just chillin'. We're listening to Run DMC and making toys. You can't really be mad at that."

The party isn't stopping for Madl anytime soon. He has solo art shows and toy releases planned in the UK in December and in New York in April.

Rooting his business in Kansas meant coming "home-home," he says.

Madl's studio is just a few blocks from his house, in the southernmost reaches of Johnson County's sprawl. Soybeans grow in a field just across the street from the unassuming office park in Stillwell, where the other tenants include a desk manufacturer and a lawn-care company.

There, the walls have eyes — a few hundred toys stare down from shelves containing just a fraction of Madl's collection. The stash includes treasures that would make a vinyl nerd swoon. He has several toys by KAWS, the graffiti artist turned designer turned millionaire, including three Dissecteds, figures with trademark X's for eyes whose bodies are cut in half to reveal multicolored innards. Madl also displays a Yo Mama figure from Tristan Eaton, the artist who designed the Dunny (it's shaped like a pregnant mother, with a detachable belly that pulls apart to reveal a toy baby), and an eggplant-shaped, warthog­like creature designed by his friend Sket1. One of his prized figures is by Lau. Called IAMJUNKIE, it's a figure of a man stretched out like taffy, with knuckles that drag down to his feet and blocky black-rimmed glasses.

Balanced atop his two computer monitors sit dozens of his own yet-to-be-released toys, including a set of little capsule-shaped guys with feet called Sharpest Sprayers, set for release in January. They look like Sharpee-brand markers topped with caps or crowns that come off to reveal spray-paint nozzles. One wears a Kangol-shaped hat and has stripes down its sides, like a track jacket. They all wear little shell-toe sneakers with an "M" for Madl on the sides.

"I always used to think, Wouldn't it be cool to have little spray-paint robots that you direct and they do all the work?"

Sketches of various projects sit on Madl's drafting table beside drippy jars of silver ink and cups of pencils and markers. There are traces of the work he just finished for Upper Deck, the company best known for making sports trading cards. Upper Deck hired Madl to contribute to a line of dolls modeled after hockey, basketball and football players. Each time Upper Deck releases a new figure, Madl says, it sells out in 30 minutes.

"Sports collectors don't know who I am. They snap them up because this is a Sydney Crosby character," he says, referring to the Pittsburgh Penguins center.

Recently, Kid Robot asked him to design his own line of toys, exclusively produced by Kid Robot.

Madl came up with the idea of Bent World Vandals, a series of 10 toys that look like graffiti tools — fat permanent markers, thick paintbrushes, aerosol cans and roller brushes — with faces, arms, sneaker-clad feet and cartoony names such as "Da Flow," "Sloppy" and "So Fine." The toys, which were released in August, come with a warning label that reads, "We do not promote or endorse illegal graffiti or vandalism. If you get busted don't try to blame us. These are just toys, so if you try to use them to 'get up' they won't work ... GET BENT."

There's an 11th toy in the Bent World series — the chase toy — called Big Money. On the box, it's a big, black-silhouetted question mark. But watchers of Madl's work can guess what it looks like: a blocky dollar symbol pierced with three strike-through lines instead of one.

Madl collaborated with a Los Angeles company called Random Nature to make the Big Money symbol into a gold-plated necklace on a chain; he wears one most of the time. He made 13 special necklaces, with silver crossbones peeking from behind the gold Big Money symbol, to give to his 13 "subscribers" — hardcore collectors who pay Madl $2,500 upfront for a year's worth of his creations, mailed out to them throughout the year. Madl has a waiting list of hopeful future subscribers.

The Big Money symbol means a lot to Madl, but it's not what you think.

"It's not so much that I'm about making money as it is a reminder of what money can do to you," he says. "I have a lot of friends, artists who, in my mind, have lost their focus, lost why they started doing this to begin with.... As with anything in life, if you're really passionate about it, good things will come. But I don't like the egos that come with money, the cliques and the drama and the politics. It really doesn't interest me."

He uses the symbol so much, he says, because it reminds him what's important. "I'd rather focus my energy and time on things that make me happy. On being happy."