Comic-Con Exclusive Vampire Byul
Way back when the vampire Pullip set was first spotted as prototypes in doll shows, it was accompanied by a Byul. Byul is the red-headed stepchild of the Pullip family. She’s really freaky looking, not much like the other dolls at all. Strangely though, the vampire Byul looked really interesting, probably because the things that don’t make her work so well as a cute doll (giant eyes, weird face shape, open mouth) work pretty good as a scary monster doll.
See? Freaky, but cool. Even my husband thinks so, and the first time I showed him a Byul his exact words were “None of those are ever coming into our house.”
When the vampire set rolled around, Byul was not released with them, which was disappointing. Byul later showed up on Suemomo’s flickr account. Suemomo is a shop owner from the EU, and generally does way better pictures of dolls than JP or Groove does; they finally recognized this and started sending her new releases to photograph for them. This has not had a good impact on many collectors’ wallets. Eventually, it was discovered that the doll will be this year’s comic-con exclusive doll.
Comic-con is a huge comic-toy-movie convention. It’s in San Diego, and I’ve never been. Last year, the Comic-con doll was available through preorder at the VOTD shop, which has since fallen out of favor with Groove and no longer sells any of their dolls. So far no other online shops have stepped up, so it may be a hell of a lot harder to get her this year. We’ll see.