These are the Ironlords, some of the crappiest toys I’ve ever encountered. They were produced in 1983 by Midge Toys, a Hong Kong toy maker specializing in die-cast cars, trains, cap guns and similar junk. Whatever “metal” was used for Ironlords was so cheap and brittle that nearly every unopened card I’ve encountered has breakage on at least one figure. You can tell these are garbage toys because there are stacks of them on eBay unopened for a couple bucks each.

There are three varieties, the Demons, the Reptillions and the Barbarians, five figures for each faction on their own card. The Barbarians are pretty boring, the Reptillions only marginally less so. The Demons are pretty cool, actually. Gakk is probably the best of the fifteen. At least five designs are lifted directly from Wally Wood comics. Gakk, Ghan and Vlad all appear in “War of the Wizards,” from Vampirella #10. Love that Vlad and Ghan are essentially the same figure with different accessories. Taurus Max and maybe Skeletus appear in “Prelude to Armageddon” from Creepy #41. The illustrations on the back of the card are so consistent that I assume the rest also come from Wood comics I am not familiar with.

But that’s not all. Around the same time, Helm Toys released three fantasy figure play sets (Demon Mountain, Castle of the Three-Headed Dragon and Fortress of the Wizard King, 1983) that make use of all five Demon Ironlords, albeit posed slightly differently. Their opponents are knock-off recasts of Britains’ Knights of the Swords and the three-headed dragon is the Dragonriders of the Styx with two extra heads fused comically next to the central, original head. Someday, I might own one, but they seem vanishingly rare. Love to see the pirates pirating from pirates, you know?