Phase One: The Illustration Years
Before any figure existed, The Monsters world was built through illustration. Kasing Lung developed his cast of characters over years of personal project work — paintings, prints, and picture-book style compositions that established the visual vocabulary of the forest world. These illustrations are the ur-texts of the universe: the versions of the characters that are closest to Lung's unmediated creative vision, without the engineering constraints of toy production.
The illustration work established several world-building fundamentals that all subsequent figure production has maintained: the deep forest setting, the ambiguous moral status of the creatures, the specific palette ranges that define different characters, and the sense of a world with its own ecology and time scale. These fundamentals are more structural than decorative — they define what kind of universe The Monsters inhabits.
Collectors who have seen the illustration work describe a strong feeling of recognition when encountering the figures for the first time: not because the illustrations are widely known, but because the figures so faithfully carry the world that the illustrations established. The three-dimensional transition is unusually successful, preserving not just visual surface features but the deeper atmosphere of the world.
Phase Two: Early Figure Production and Discovery
The first Monsters figures brought the world out of illustration and into material form — a translation that introduced new dimensions of engagement while preserving the essential world-building. Early collectors who discovered The Monsters in this phase often describe the experience as stumbling upon something that felt like it had always existed but had just been found rather than created.
The early figure production runs were relatively limited, establishing the secondary market dynamic that has characterized The Monsters ever since: scarcity relative to demand. This scarcity was not strategic at first — it simply reflected the reality of small-scale production — but it created a collector culture of careful attention and active seeking that has persisted even as production scale increased.
Key world-building decisions made during this phase include the standardization of the scale relationship between different characters (ensuring that Labubu and Zimomo figures from different series could be displayed together convincingly) and the establishment of the colorway vocabulary that distinguishes characters from each other across production variants.
Phase Three: Pop Mart Partnership and Global Expansion
The Pop Mart partnership marked the moment when The Monsters universe went from a known quantity in specialist collector circles to a genuinely global cultural phenomenon. Pop Mart's retail infrastructure, blind box format expertise, and international distribution capability enabled a scale of world-building that Lung alone could not have achieved — new characters, new thematic series, collaborations with other IPs and designers, all building out the implied world.
The blind box format, while primarily a commercial mechanism, also served a world-building function: by making each series a set of related variants rather than individual standalone figures, it created the implicit narrative of a world in which the same characters exist across different contexts, moods, and environments. Collectors who chase complete series are, in a meaningful sense, building a richer picture of the world through their collecting.
The global expansion brought the world to audiences who interpreted it through their own cultural lenses — the forest spirit energy resonated with Japanese collectors through the yokai tradition, with Southeast Asian collectors through their own rich creature folklore, with European and North American collectors through the fairy tale tradition. The Monsters universe proved to be genuinely multilingual in a way that even Lung's most optimistic projections likely did not anticipate.
Phase Four: Cultural Moment and What Comes Next
The 2024-2025 period marked The Monsters' entry into mainstream pop culture consciousness — a viral moment driven by celebrity associations, social media ubiquity, and the sudden awareness of Labubu among audiences with no prior art toy collecting history. This cultural moment expanded the world's audience dramatically, bringing in new collectors who will grow the community's size and diversity for years to come.
New entries to The Monsters universe in this phase are approaching a world that has substantially more accumulated meaning than newcomers realize. Every figure exists in a context of prior figures, implied relationships, established visual vocabulary, and community interpretation that adds meaning invisible to the uninitiated. This accumulated world-building depth is what distinguishes a universe with staying power from a trend moment.
The Voxelyo editions — Duck Bubu, Snow Wing Bubu, Angel Bubu, Pink Fang Bubu — were developed in the context of this world-building momentum. Each edition carries the accumulated meaning of the Labubu character while adding its own thematic layer, making them ideal entry points for collectors who want to begin their relationship with The Monsters universe at a moment when it has never been richer or more alive.