In a lot of ways, Pauls Valley is like any other small town in Oklahoma friendly people, a proud past, but an uncertain future.

Here, though, the future is a little more certain.

An ambitious project is growing downtown, something no other city anywhere has ever tried.

We believe we're going to be the only one in the world, at least the first one in the world.

I think after people see this, there'll be probably 2 or 3 more.

But, but this will be devoted to action figures and the art and design of the action figures.

We think Kevin Stark knows a little something about action figures.

Chances are you've seen his work.

I started out, actually with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

That was the first property I worked on, and I did a lot of like, mutation charts and, you know, things that went in the packaging, sewer maps and things like that.

And so a lot of these little critters here, you know, the mutating turtles, that kind of stuff worked on the plans for the Technodrome.

The packaging for the Coneheads worked on those, the mask which was the Jim Carrey movie, in the animated series.

Then, for Toy Island, we worked on a, property of, for Dreamworks, which was called Toonsylvania and did the whole line designed that.

And how the toys were going to work.

For The Mummy, I saw the practically, practically the whole movie in book form before it came out.

So there was a large book that just had photos of all of the characters and things like that in the sands and all that.

So we designed the toys based on those character, photos.

So.

And what each of the toys would do.

His childhood passion has become his life's work.

His collection numbers more than 7000.

So I'm kind of the unofficial tourism spot of Pauls Valley because you come in it, it looks very conservative on the outside and yet there are all these toys and all this color on the inside.

Since local children and now even tour groups stop in to see the collection, Kevin and other city leaders decided to take the next step by leaping toward the future in a single bound.

I don't get these muscled up right now.

Most toy museums are people's private collections that they've put behind glass, and children can't play with anything.

And I can't think of anything that would be more tortured than to be a five, six, seven year old kid.

And you can't pick anything up.

So we're going to have an interactive museum that will show, how toys are made, how action figures are designed.

You know, some of the work I've done, that kind of stuff.

But also things that they can play with, things I can crawl around on, you know, life size action figures, all that kind of stuff.

It's about a 2 to $3 million project, and that alone would be enough to keep most folks busy.

But it's only a part of how Kevin Stark fills his days and nights.

I have a band that's been together since 97.

I started it as, just an excuse to get together and play music and there be no, work involved.

So we weren't going to play live, and we weren't going to write material that we had to rehearse over and over.

So it was going to all be improvised.

It was just a loose knit group of musicians that got together, once a week and played music and drank beer.

So, but, since, we quit drinking the beer and it's become, a kind of a job too.

So we still improvise the music, but, we now perform live.

We have our second album coming out this fall.

The name of his group is both distinctive and somewhat anonymous.

Well, we wanted a name that you couldn't tell immediately what kind of music we play.

You know, Megadeth.

Metallica.

It's pretty easy to tell what kind of music they play.

And, and we also wanted a sense of humor about it.

So, we were originally called Dog Toy, but we found out someone else was already called that.

So we went for my dog's favorite toy, which was his Squeaky Burger so Squeaky burger.

It is.

But it's not the band or even the toy museum that has folks here buzzing.

It's an old guy named geezer.

I developed him at a time when, there were a lot of comics coming out of, you know, the hot chicks, you know, the babes you know, that were, real tough and and of course, everyone was very beautiful and comics and, and, you know, wore spandex really well.

And, I thought, well, what happens if, like, regular people get superpowers, you know, housewives or hairdressers or or Joe, the mechanic or or geezer, it's actually part of a diabolical alien plot to heighten the DNA of a primitive species.

Us.

The aliens pick out their test subjects and give them superpowers.

One of their targets is 79 year old Grady Crump.

He's got a few superpowers, but he still deals with, you know, issues that, you know, the older generation deal with, like bladder control problems.

He still has that, he doesn't like to fly at night.

He doesn't see really well.

Geyser is patterned partly after Kevin's dad and partly after an older gentleman who was a regular at one of the local cafes.

Other characters are also inspired by real people.

One of my favorites is Slow Motion Girl, which was patterned after my wife.

She's going to kill me for telling this story, but I was picking her up for lunch one day at work and she just never came out.

So I got out of the car and went in and and her coworker said, well, I told her to go ahead and go to lunch, but I guess she's just being slow motion girl.

So I was like, ooh, ooh, okay, there's a character right there.

Geyser runs every day in the Pauls Valley Daily Democrat, and soon geyser will star in an illustrated novel.

John Schultz, the son of the newspaper publisher, has spent his summer vacation from OSU coloring in the panels Kevin draws.

The whole idea is the brainchild of Kevin and business associate Tony Leddy.

If we can get geyser launched, if we can get the comic novel, ready for distribution, that we could generate some, income stream to be able to then do what we really want to do, and that's to create the studio that, young artists can come and work at and have a great environment to work in and just a fun atmosphere.

And so Kevin had this vision for himself and just needed somebody to help dream it with him.

The dream for geyser includes, of course, a toy line, an animated series, maybe even a movie.

Pauls Valley may be Smallville to some, but it's a regular Gotham City when it comes to superheroic ideas.