The Year of Selling Out, Pt. 2
I've been wanting to make t-shirts and various merchandise-type objects of some of my designs for a couple of years now, that they might earn me big fat money while I do little but place reorders from behind my glasslike-surfaced mahogany desk Now that fateful day has come. It's hardly finished, but it fills me with orgiastic delight to announce that
SURLYSQUID.COM
is open for business, in a rudimentary plywood-shack-by-the-side-of-the-road kind of way. Futuristic abilities like Buy Now buttons are forthcoming, but I have 10 dozen shirts here at the house and a bunch of new Tyvek envelopes from Office Depot, so feel free to email me right this very second because you can no longer contain your garment lust.
I did a poll a year or more ago on what pictures people wanted on shirts, and I tried to hew close to their usually polite demands. One I got after I had the first round made: I mentioned on a kitten-laden site I frequent that I'd been advised to get guy's shirts in M, L, and XL, no XXL. Someone replied, "Did you tell your source of that info that this was the Internet?" So shirts from here on in will be ordered in L, XL, and XXL. Which means that even if the XXLs don't sell, I can wear 'em while I watch the staff polish the limo in the HQ hangar. Your king, he has been blessed with the Burl.
I looked into making them myself, but decided that I have enough damn things to make as it is, so I went to Lo-Fi Mike, who I've known for a couple of years (I had a show at his place a while back). He's a good man and did an excellent job.
I actually did do a small round of shirts myself for a show a few years ago, with a Print Gocco machine (more info here). The Gocco is an excellent device that tidily makes 3.5 x 5" silkscreens and can print on fabric as well as paper, but not only were the t-shirts and thongs I made not of professional quality, they were just barely of El Rey quality. Which is saying something. There is, though, at least one maribou-trimmed Devil Bunny thong out in the world still getting regular use, that I know of. Which is nice. I may still use the Gocco for tiny little prints someday.
Anyway, back to Selling Out. I plan to emblazon basically any item I think someone might like to own with my pictures and put it up for sale. Do you have an uncomfortable, tingling urge for an El Rey cigar cutter, or pencil case? Let me know.
(On reading that back, "tingling urge"+"cigar cutter"+"pencil case" might provide fodder for the deconstructionists/Freudophiles among you. Purely accidental, I assure you. El Rey doesn't work blue.)
Eventually, surlysquid.com (bookmark it now! etc.) will be more than just an El-Rey-merchadising juggernaut, I'd like to think. Does anyone remember the Chicken Boy catalog? They're still around and still selling loopy goods; their printed catalog has/had a bunch of Chicken Boy stuff and a lot of other excellent goofy crap, kinda like Archie McPhee. Eventually, maybe SURLYSQUID.COM (just the one last one) will be something like that. Maybe.
Do you make nifty things? Lemme know and maybe we'll put it up in the store.
SURLYSQUID.COM
is open for business, in a rudimentary plywood-shack-by-the-side-of-the-road kind of way. Futuristic abilities like Buy Now buttons are forthcoming, but I have 10 dozen shirts here at the house and a bunch of new Tyvek envelopes from Office Depot, so feel free to email me right this very second because you can no longer contain your garment lust.
I did a poll a year or more ago on what pictures people wanted on shirts, and I tried to hew close to their usually polite demands. One I got after I had the first round made: I mentioned on a kitten-laden site I frequent that I'd been advised to get guy's shirts in M, L, and XL, no XXL. Someone replied, "Did you tell your source of that info that this was the Internet?" So shirts from here on in will be ordered in L, XL, and XXL. Which means that even if the XXLs don't sell, I can wear 'em while I watch the staff polish the limo in the HQ hangar. Your king, he has been blessed with the Burl.
I looked into making them myself, but decided that I have enough damn things to make as it is, so I went to Lo-Fi Mike, who I've known for a couple of years (I had a show at his place a while back). He's a good man and did an excellent job.
I actually did do a small round of shirts myself for a show a few years ago, with a Print Gocco machine (more info here). The Gocco is an excellent device that tidily makes 3.5 x 5" silkscreens and can print on fabric as well as paper, but not only were the t-shirts and thongs I made not of professional quality, they were just barely of El Rey quality. Which is saying something. There is, though, at least one maribou-trimmed Devil Bunny thong out in the world still getting regular use, that I know of. Which is nice. I may still use the Gocco for tiny little prints someday.
Anyway, back to Selling Out. I plan to emblazon basically any item I think someone might like to own with my pictures and put it up for sale. Do you have an uncomfortable, tingling urge for an El Rey cigar cutter, or pencil case? Let me know.
(On reading that back, "tingling urge"+"cigar cutter"+"pencil case" might provide fodder for the deconstructionists/Freudophiles among you. Purely accidental, I assure you. El Rey doesn't work blue.)
Eventually, surlysquid.com (bookmark it now! etc.) will be more than just an El-Rey-merchadising juggernaut, I'd like to think. Does anyone remember the Chicken Boy catalog? They're still around and still selling loopy goods; their printed catalog has/had a bunch of Chicken Boy stuff and a lot of other excellent goofy crap, kinda like Archie McPhee. Eventually, maybe SURLYSQUID.COM (just the one last one) will be something like that. Maybe.
Do you make nifty things? Lemme know and maybe we'll put it up in the store.
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