Oh weird. I had no idea. I had seen the 'Zel art industry' posts about bringing back old sculpts and assumed it was him putting them up. Sad stuff.
I’m in the same boat. He is one of the main sculptors that really got me jazzed about toy collecting as an adult in my early 30’s. His skill, level of weirdness, and nods to vintage translated into some of the most memorable neo kaiju produced to date.
This is all starting to get a little weird and shady. I think vintage toy keleido might be running the new exo operations, but never notes he had passed. As well he’s one of the players in NAG, which has officially jumped the shark with the latest Kamen Rider and is equally questionable. This whole profiting off of dead sofubi artists isn’t sitting right with me. Props to Zollmen for their honorable actions.
I was more than surprise about the Zollmen posting. Had no Idea, specially cos I thought that Exohead was going to do all of this old sculpts. I think that my favorite Zollmens are Exohead scuplts.
Sad to hear Exohead has passed, but honestly I didn’t even know “Exohead” was an individual until I read the post on Zollmen’s Instagram. Seeing the posts of new old stock has my hopes up I’ll get to add to my collection, but I wonder how easy or difficult that will turn out to be…
The timing is suspect for sure--posts from ZeL explicitly mentioning a sale started this year. Then last week, "Two more photos to upload, then an announcement". Now Zollmen posts saying they actually hold rights to the work, and will not be releasing anything. It seems to me like ZeL drumming up attention for a new sale forced Zollmen to publicly announce Exohead's death, where they otherwise did not plan/wish to.
News will come out soon. Zollmen and Exo were very close and it’s Zollmen who everyone should be trusting here. The family asked for the death the be secret for year as to mourn his death.