Ryan Brunty's grandfather died in 2012, and Brunty, who ran his own roofing-adjacent trade at the time, spent the following two weeks unable to leave the house. He lost both jobs he was working. Alone at his kitchen table, he started drawing self-portraits just to have something to do with his hands, and at some point a small, furry, exhausted-looking monster came out of it instead of his own face. He's said it was the first time he'd actually managed to put what he was feeling into a shape he could look at. He named it Yerman.
Most character origin stories stop being interesting once the character starts selling merchandise, but this one didn't. Brunty kept drawing Yerman through murals, apparel, small resin runs, gallery pieces, and eventually built an entire brand around it, Depressed Monsters, without ever softening the premise. The shirts and plushes sold well specifically because they weren't coy about what they were: an object built to be hugged on a bad day, sold by someone who's been open from the start about why it exists. Yerman turned up on Hot Topic shelves and in murals and, in whatever way a drawing of a sad little monster can, became a real touchpoint for a specific kind of internet audience that grew up watching mental health slowly stop being something you had to hide.
What it never got, in twelve years, was an actual mass-produced toy. This June, that changed. Toys on Tap launched a Kickstarter for the first official Yerman sofubi, a 6-inch soft vinyl figure sculpted by Mark Pendley and packaged by Oriel Van der Lugt, staying close enough to Brunty's original drawing that it reads as a preservation rather than a redesign, right down to Yerman still clutching the Skele-Heart charm that's followed the character through most of its later art. The campaign didn't stop at one colorway. Backers could choose a Blank Edition with no expression at all, an "I Feel Gray" monochrome variant, an "I Feel Invisible" clear variant limited to 50 pieces, and, once the campaign crossed a stretch goal, an "I Feel Fragile" edition finished to look like cracked, gold-repaired kintsugi ceramic, the version that basically turns the whole concept of the toy into a design decision about what healing actually looks like.
It closed on July 12 having raised $12,637 against a $6,000 goal, more than double, from 60 backers who weren't buying a toy so much as buying into something they'd already been carrying around for over a decade in other forms. Figures start shipping to backers in September. Brunty, reflecting on the campaign, said simply that seeing the character become a physical object after this long felt surreal, which tracks: it took the industry twelve years to catch up to something he'd already understood about himself in a single afternoon at his kitchen table.
