While passing by the vending machines full of gumballs, sticky hands and plastic rings, I noticed something new. It was summer and money was burning a hole in my pocket. I knew I needed to buy them, so I bought two.

There they were in my hand. Two Homies. Two little plastic characterizations — one of a short, wide-eyed guy with owl-horned hair and a scared look on his face, the other of a sly-looking man in shades with slicked-back hair, shiny shoes and a suit that would make Don Johnson jealous.

Why did I buy these toys? Because we all need homies to watch our back, of course. And good homies aren’t too easy to find in Ames. At least they weren’t until stores all over town started selling them.

So by now I’ve got about 12 Homies at home and staring at me from atop my keyboard at the Daily. I’ve got a tall, goofy-looking guy named Lurch (it turns out that in Homie-land, he supplies the car parts for the lowriders), there’s a crying girl Homie and a fly-looking Homie in a wheelchair with miniature wheels. I still haven’t gotten any of the dogs out of my 50-cent gambles on the vending machine.

Oh well, we don’t get to choose our homies.

Still, I’m thinking I’m pretty strange to be wasting money on plastic toys.

Then I saw them featured in a music magazine and found the www.homies.tv Web site. It turns out there are a lot of people like me, and there is one creator who has many Latino caricatures in his head. Not the caricatures of the stereotypical “homie” — the one portrayed not by the face or character of the person, but instead by a flannel shirt buttoned to the top with big black sunglasses hiding the eyes.

This guy’s Homies are defined by unique faces, clothes and emotion-full poses.

Still, there may be those who would stick an exploitation label on these all-Latino Homies. It’s not. The difference is that each character is unique, showing many different sides of life.

Could you make 100 intriguing caricatures out of people in your ‘hood? Of course you could, it would be easy. So would it be stereotyping to do so? Not if you do it truthfully.

And you could call them Clonies, or something corny like that, and sell them in places like California and New York, places where Midwesterners would be interesting enough to want to collect.

As for myself, I haven’t passed by a Homies machine in a few weeks, but if you plan on coming into the Daily and touching my computer, watch out — you mess with me and you’re messing with my Homies.

Jeff Mitchell

is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Urbandale. He is the arts and entertainment editor of the Daily.