NAPERVILLE, Ill. -- Joe Trupia fell back into the seat of an old wooden school desk.
He looked weary, tired or nervous. It was hard to tell which. Probably all three. He’d had a hectic, anxious past few weeks. For one thing, he still didn’t know how to respond to the heartbreaking emails he’s been getting from Ukrainian customers. His company, Citizen Brick, founded a dozen years ago, makes largely underground, nearly clandestine, often satiric, very limited edition quasi-Lego minifigures and playsets. Many are bawdy, hilarious, the sort of stuff Lego would never touch. Such as a Lego-ish “Breaking Bad”-like meth lab. Or a strip club featuring “realistic spinning action,” titled “Center for the Performing Arts.”
He once made a Harry Carey minifigure titled “Cubs Enthusiast.”
And a Girl Scout minifigure named “Cookie Pusher.”
Earlier this month, as a change of pace, he got serious for a moment. He created a limited-edition Lego-like minifigure of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He sold his Zelenskyys for $100 a pop. Plus, Lego-ish Molotov cocktails for $20 each. He did it to raise money for medical aid to Ukraine, and from his Naperville warehouse, he raised $145,388.
But then, of course, no good deed goes unpunished.
“This week alone,” he said, “I have been called war profiteer, Nazi, Zionist, Nazi Zionist.” He said a Russian teenager sent an email asking why didn’t he make a Putin minifigure. Trupia explained that he “couldn’t print on dog (expletive).” He winced at his choice of words even as he recounted them. As a former business partner had once told him: Joe, you have got to stop replying to your death threats.
The good news, his fans outnumber his critics.
On Monday morning, from an office on the mezzanine of his headquarters in the back of a nondescript industrial park in Naperville, he glanced down at his assembly floor, where a handful of his five employees were silently and swiftly clicking together scores of Lil’ Zelenskyys to ship out later that day. He won’t say how many Zelenskyys he’s sold, to discourage online collectors from inflating their already steep resale price; he’ll only say he’s sold more than 1,000 Zelenskyys. And also, he’s not taking new orders for Zelenskyys.
But he has set aside about 50 for Ukrainian collectors who have been writing him, pleading with him for one. They tell him they left their Lego sets when they fled their homes. They want his Zelenskyy when they return — “and ‘when they win,’ that’s how they phrase it in the emails, in every one of the emails.” That said, he’s grown nervous about sending them a minifigure that a Russian soldier might discover.
He sighs, rubs his face.
This is not the kind of headache he anticipated when he created Citizen Brick in 2010, which back then was just a small business based in Ravenswood. His biggest concern, then and now, remains Lego itself.
His entire company model is based on customizing existing Lego bricks. Indeed, the entire custom Lego market thrives on this model, navigating inside a kind of legal DMZ. Trupia says often that he is mindful of running afoul of Lego, and to be complimentary of Lego products, and that he goes out of his way to make certain his work is never confused with Lego toys. But he is also proud of how much that custom work looks just like Lego — albeit, if Lego were in an alternate universe. Which, of course, is the joke. He heard recently from sources at Lego — he has fans within the company, as do other custom builders — that an internal memo circulated, noting his Zelenskyys and Molotov cocktails were not a Lego product.
He squirms visibly at this.
It’s not the first time this has happened. When that meth lab debuted, Lego was fielding angry emails confusing Citizen Brick’s work as an official Lego playset. “Until I had a mortgage and kids and college tuition coming, this all seemed kind of funny,” he said. He’s the guy who makes a Lego figure of that one friend who passes out at a party and his pals write on him with Sharpies. He’s not the guy who makes custom Spider-Man and Disney Princess sets. He sees himself on the continuum of a Lego fan culture that now winds far beyond Lego itself, to include museum shows, summer camps, artists who now regard the humble Lego brick as a legit medium of expression. He hesitates to call himself an artist, but “I am part of that ecosystem. What keeps me awake is I do not know what part of the food chain I’m in.”
Trupia is 45, lives in Naperville, has short hair that rises in faint gray streaks, like the bassist in an indie Americana band. He wears a work shirt and the New Balance sneakers of middle age. He’s a quiet guy — the first thing he mutters when we meet is, “I’m not media savvy” — but also loudly Gen-X, prone to undercutting himself, self-deprecating. When he first heard his work was showing up in Lego offices, he imagined shivs in prisons. He grew up near New York City, then Geneva in suburban Chicago; attended Southern Illinois University, studied print making in the graduate program at School of the Art Institute of Chicago; left for a Manhattan graphic design firm, then returned and taught print making at Columbia College and Harold Washington College in the City Colleges of Chicago. Citizen Brick began on a whim, as art-school provocation using a famously peaceable medium. “I thought it was funny to put nipples on a Lego guy,” he said. “To me it was an aesthetic exercise. You have a fixed amount of space, a fixed number of colors. OK, now weave that into a very sanitary world. Lego is hard to print on. It’s so well made, the tolerance is fantastic. Coming out of art school, everything’s fair game. It’s all appropriation. Though you do not want market confusion, and as this got bigger, there were legal things to consider.”
A couple of decades or so ago, the custom Lego community was relatively small and not especially professional. Lego itself, until it licensed “Star Wars” playsets from Lucasfilm in the 1990s, was a struggling shell of what it is now: the largest toy maker in the world, making $7.2 billion in 2020 alone.
Two decades later, beneath the showcase of official, mainstream pastel-colored Lego, there now thrives an international underground network, of collectors, bootleggers and custom builders with formal businesses, a kind of reminder of how influential and large Lego became. Albeit an underground network based on Lego material. And so ,custom builders tend to describe a mostly gentle, sensitive, if somewhat vague relationship with Lego, a Danish company that maintains its North American headquarters in Connecticut. Asked to clarify its position on Citizen Brick and Zelenskyy minifigures, a Lego spokeswoman replied via email that “This initiative has absolutely nothing to do with the Lego Group” and no connection to the company. Still, talk to aftermarket businesses themselves and they often refer to civilized conversations with Lego staff and lawyers, and a generous patience from the company.
“They often seem like they don’t want to upset this community,” said Dan Siskind, owner of Brickmania, a Minneapolis custom builder with five stores nationwide (including Schaumburg). Though he is working with Lego bricks, he makes and sells his own custom sets, never Lego’s. The Lego logo never appears on his website or packaging. He says he’s on a first-name basis with the Lego legal department. “They do have limits of what they will tolerate, but as long as we leave trademarks alone, and licenses alone, and never suggest Lego might endorse what we do, they tend to leave the aftermarket alone. That said, all of us who do this, we know we are living in a shadow of what Lego’s lawyers will let us get away with.”
But then, how would it look for a toy company that espouses there are no limits to the imagination to shut down some of its truest believers, who use it product to push beyond what even Lego itself will create?
Siskind specializes in historical military vehicles and minifigures, an area Lego tends to avoid. (In fact, before Trupia, he was selling Ukrainian military vehicles, and mini-Zelenskyys, to raise aid money. So far, he’s pulled in about $31,000.) And like other custom creators, he maintains discrete limits. For the sake of World War II dioramas, he does offer recognizable German figures, though nothing with swastikas.
“We’re never going to do Hitler, for example,” Siskind said. “Joe, though, he’s more off the wall. Not Hitler off-the-wall, but when it’s cringy, you sort of know it’s Citizen Brick.”
Trupia himself describes his line in the sand this way:
He would never offer a Lincoln minifigure; he could imagine Lego offering a Lincoln.
“But I could do a John Wilkes Booth.”
Trupia stood in front of his mini-assembly line. “We’re going to need more Zelenskyy hair,” said Betsy Ochoa, a former art student who has worked at Citizen Brick five years.
“OK, let me know,” he said, “two hundred more, three hundred more.”
He glided over to a computer to answer email.
Rachael Keown, who works here with her husband, Jon, was snapping together Zelenskyy bodies, then shifting them to Ochoa, who was fitting on black hair helmets. Across the table, Kathleen Aguinaldo was matching orders for small, realistic-looking guns with the small guns themselves, which Trupia gets from a third-party builder. Since Lego doesn’t sell specific (or real world) guns, Citizen Brick sells a lot of them. That and mini bongs are his bread and butter. I asked his workers if they ever get offended by the pieces made here. Ochoa said not really, but she doesn’t care about the punk bands Trupia likes to enshrine as minifigures. There is a generation gap here, he laughed. He insisted on a Daniel Day-Lewis-ish “There Will Be Blood” minifigure (titled “Milkshake Enthusiast”), but his staff could not care less.
He picked up a black capsule-sized piece.
“A baby dressed in leather,” he said, adding, “which, of course, is indefensible.”
After 12 years of figures and accessories, eventually he needed a reference library, which here is a couple of long glassed-in bookshelves lined with every Citizen Brick minifigure, from first to most recent. He started with a shirtless minifigure with hairy back, to prove he could print on a Lego. After that, on shelf after shelf, S&M minifigures, corpses still scarred from autopsy, a Norwegian death metal band, then, though never identified exactly as such, mini versions of Eazy-E from rap group N.W.A., Al Pacino from “Scarface,” the band DEVO, Mike Ditka, Mötley Crüe, Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, Guy Fieri, Rocky, Prince, Carrie, tattooed hipsters, two-headed Chicago baseball fans, sweaty overweight businessmen, Boy Scouts, Neil deGrasse Tyson. There’s trays with nine colors of mini Lego-adjacent bongs, and eight colors of mini rubber chickens. There’s tiny Chicago flags and Pee-Wee Herman torsos and detached AC/DC heads.
Arguably it’s parody, or artful commentary — both of which might also offer a bit of legal cover — though certainly it’s all in line with the adult community of Lego builders, a growing niche. The new Museum of Science and Industry exhibit on Lego is mostly centered on large-scale Lego brick-crafted replicas of masterpieces of art and antiquity. Adam Reed Tucker, a former practicing architect in the Chicago suburbs (who had his own MSI exhibit in 2016), helped establish an official Lego Architecture series with sets based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Pennsylvania and Robie House in Hyde Park. Lego itself, in recent years, has offered nostalgia-flavored playsets (of typewriters, old-school Adidas, vintage Nintendo consoles) as a mindfulness tool for grown-ups.
“And yet the audience of adults who would spend $100 for a Zelenskyy, that’s narrow,” Trupia said. “I don’t think that’s threatening anyone.” Though he only began keeping track a couple of years ago of how many figures he’s sold, since then he’s sold 90,000 minifigures (for around $25 each). He sells in small batches of about one thousand, and usually sold out within 48 hours. He thinks of Citizen Brick as a farmers market of graphic design. Still, he returns to the same point again and again: “If Lego wanted to make this go away ... If I was sued, even if I could win, I couldn’t afford to fight it. I don’t even know what the legal footing here is here. I am happy to sell things that share their DNA but then it would break my heart to be on an enemies list.”
His lawyer, Konrad Sherinian, a Naperville patent attorney, said that Trupia has “every right” to create something fresh using Lego pieces, and that Lego has no more right to claim exclusive use of a plastic brick than Ford has a right to claim a car engine. David Schwartz, associate dean of research and intellectual life at Northwestern University’s law school, and professor who specializes in intellectual property and patent, said Lego’s relationship to the Lego aftermarket reminded him of how large media companies navigate fan fiction, which often takes IP and re-fashions it for new, very different artistic work. He’s reminded, too, of the lack of success Mattel has had historically when pushing back against artists who incorporate Barbie into new works. Also, copyright and trademark protection often do not extend to functional products. Plus, on the patent side, patents for Lego’s original pieces expired many years ago.
Nevertheless, Trupia plays nice.
He avoids depictions of “human misery,” he said. Though he custom-made a Portillo’s “enthusiast” minifigure for that company’s chief executives, he also stays away from corporate logos. He’s turned down the National Rifle Association. Still, his fidelity to Lego’s quality is such that, even as he was receiving a cease-and-desist order from Sony Pictures for his “Breaking Bad”-inspired playset, he was being asked by Bryan Cranston to send him one. He’s made John Oliver playsets for John Oliver. And when an HBO marketing executive complimented his “Game of Thrones” minifigures, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you mean the ‘Dragon Sword Fighter Force?”
He has never made “Sopranos” minifigures.
But he does make “The Gabagool Gang.”
He wants Citizen Brick to be like indie record labels he grew up adoring, the kind that had a loving, irreverent relationship and community with a few fans. For those who buy his work regularly, he sends a large medallion. Inscribed in its crest is Latin, which translates roughly to: “Give Me Your Money Nerd.”
OK, so how does he use Lego pieces to make Lego-like, non-Lego objects? Volume. Like other custom creators, he buys tubs of blank Lego pieces, often from overseas sources. He prints on them using presses that print in multiple colors. His warehouse is deep with loose bricks, and pulverized Lego shards, which he melts down and sculpts into Lego-size accessories that Lego would never make.
Tiny cigarettes, Amazon boxes, VHS tapes, bingo cards, machetes.
Trupia suspects he and other custom designers have served, in small ways, as a test lab for Lego. “They’ve come a lot closer to us than we have come to them.” Since he started Citizen Brick, Lego has introduced characters with tattoos; they even started making playsets of “Seinfeld” and “Queer Eye.”
He hates “bumping into Lego,” however unintentionally.
Last year, Lego unveiled a version of the “Home Alone” house in Winnetka. Citizen Brick already spoofed “Home Alone” — er,“The Negligent Parents Abandoned Child Home Invasion Holiday Fun Set.”
Trupia’s been bootlegged himself.
Not that he can complain.
His Zelenskyy will be bootlegged, he knows. He’s getting hundreds of emails daily asking for more. But no, no — Citizen Brick, seemingly tolerated by Lego, refuses to get larger. “I hesitate to call this my art, but making something in Lego is about distilling down an idea or person to a few ingredients. It’s a perfect little palate. (Zelenskyy) has black hair, green jersey, five o’clock shadow. The image you’d see on a stamp. Look, one day I’m making toy bongs, and the next day I’m retooling for a European war effort. That’s a tribute to Lego, and how a plastic brick can turn into a universal currency.”
____
