Ancient Web: Mel Birnkrant Treated Comic Character Toys as Sculpture

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Mel Birnkrant looks at an old wind-up cartoon toy and sees a sculpture. That changes what gets collected and how it deserves to be photographed.

Visit Mel Birnkrant's vintage toy archive.

Birnkrant worked as creative director for Colorforms from 1970 to 1985 and designed toys including Baby Face dolls. His sprawling personal site preserves stories behind his inventions, family albums, galleries of Mickey Mouse and early comic-character merchandise, interviews, and essays written from the perspective of both a professional maker and a collector.

The page does not read like a shop. It reads like an artist showing visitors the objects that explain his life's work.

The pie-cut eye explains an era

In Reflections in a Pie-Cut Eye, an essay he says he originally wrote in 1999, Birnkrant explains the distinctive graphic vocabulary of early newspaper comic strips. Eyes could be dots, ovals, or circles with a triangular glint: a pie with one slice removed.

He traces the relationship between flat drawings and three-dimensional merchandise, arguing that anonymous toy sculptors often transformed cartoon characters into artistic objects. One example compares several 1920s depictions of Barney Google and his horse Spark Plug, from book illustrations to a Steiff toy and a wind-up figure.

He singles out the Toonerville Trolley, describing a crank-operated model whose driver appears to struggle when the vehicle stalls. The mechanism becomes part of his argument that playful design can have expressive possibilities beyond merely reproducing a drawing.

The site's account of how Baby Face dolls were created offers a different kind of preservation: an inventor telling the story of designs, prototypes, collaborators, and the complicated path toward a manufactured toy.

Many pages remain picture-heavy and follow a winding personal navigation style. Birnkrant's opinions are those of a passionate collector, not neutral museum catalog text; that subjectivity is part of their documentary interest.

The site preserves commercial art through the eyes of somebody who understood both the factory and the drawing board. Not every object came with an artist's signature. He kept asking who gave it character anyway.

Read the 1999 essay and explore the toy collections.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.