Claudio Sanchez is just as eager to see toys and merchandise come out of the Amory Wars franchise as the fans are, but says that so far, he and Evil Ink haven’t found a fit yet. Speaking with ComicBook.com’s Jim Viscardi at Comic Con last month, Sanchez — best known for his work in the band Coheed and Cambria — said that if there was going to be an Amory Wars toy collection, he would want it to be as broadly accessible as possible, suggesting that while most companies are interested in prestige format, collector’s-type figures, he would rather see smaller, less expensive versions so that fans who aren’t rich can put together a decent collection.
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Amory Wars is a series of books and comics that have been published for years, and serve as a companion to an ongoing science fiction narrative that rolls through almost all of Coheed and Cambria’s music. The series has been going since 2004, and has invovled artists like Rags Morales and Wes Abbott.
“Oh, you want action figures?” Sanchez joked when asked about the idea. He added, “It’s funny that you say that — for a while, we’ve been talking about this. We’ve been talking with Neca, we just met — not met, I just happened to stumble on some friends over at Mondo. We have this broad concept of the Amory Wars. There’s so many characters, and we’re really lucky because our audience, whether they enjoy the music or not, really have gravitated toward certain characters….We did a cruise a couple of years ago, and fans had come dressed up as their favorite characters, whether it’s Al the Killer, Gibney, Ambellina. I think there’s so much potential for that. For me, I think it’s all about price point. I don’t want them ot be too expensive. I get it, there’s probably audience for that, that could buy those ridiculously well-done, over 12″ figures. But I played with the 3 1/2” toys as a kid. I want that. I want Star Wars/G.I. Joe size, and the cheaper they are, the more you can get, and then the collection looks really cool. That’s what I want to do, and we just haven’t found the right home for that. It’s something I think about all the time.”
The Amory Wars refers to the conflicts at the heart of the story contained in the books. The seris is set in Heaven’s Fence, a collection of 78 planets and seven stars, held in place by interconnecting beams of energy known as the Keywork. There are three main races and 12 sectors, each with their own regional mage/leader, giving it a kind of Lord of Rings-in-space feel, as there aren’t just conflicts between the humans and other races, but within and between groups, where humans from one sector can have as much conflict with one another as they would mages from another, and so on.
