Coming Soon to a Torso Near You!

BAM!!!

No, not my manly guns or my perfectly coiffed hair, the shirt. Yes, it’s a Plunger Monkey Dynamo shirt! Those of you who know me know and love PMD (and how could you not, he’s a monkey with a plunger on his head).  He’s basically a manifestation of the crazy part of my brain that came out of no where about 15 years ago. He’s grown and developed and changed over the years, but I have yet to find a good avenue to put him “out there”. He usually makes appearances on random drawings and scraps of paper, as well as a few Christmas Card envelopes every year.  And of course on the main page of this site. He has a cameo in the unfinished graphic novel Revery, and lately I’ve been thinking about doing a graphic novel centered on just him. The ideas are very loose right now, but I’m confident my brain will yell something at me, most likely when I’m trying in vain to sleep at night, and someday sooner than later PMD will be ready for the masses.

Right now, though, he’s going to help me kick off one of those other projects I keep alluding to: a tshirt company. Ever since I did my first silk screened shirt with my own original characters in high school, I’ve dreamed of making tshirts. I have tons of ideas floating around in my brain, I’ve started thumbnailing them. Lee has been a huge part of the driving force behind making this little dream take some steps into the real world, helping me get this site up and running for one, but also doing all the research into how I could pull off this little tshirt venture. It’s not ready quite yet, but the current goal is to come up with a handful of designs and then sell them through the store front we have set up (but not “open” yet) on Etsy. This shirt was a test of the quality and customer service at an online shirt printing company that will handle all the printing and shipping and billing, basically leaving me to just come up with and upload designs. If things go well, that business model might get reevaluated, but for now it’s a great, low maintenance way for me to try this out and still work on other goals (like Revery and a PMD graphic novel…). My initial assessment is that the shirt quality is great, and the print quality surprised me, it looks a little better than what my printer produced on some nice quality paper.  The only unknown right now is the durability of the inks, how much will they fade or crack, etc.

If enough people are interested, I’ll try to make this shirt available for purchase in the coming weeks. I’m still trying to get the One Hen, Two Ducks children’s book finished (I hate leaving projects hanging, but it’s sort of the nature of having many balls in the air at once), but maybe, if I can finish the current page at least, I’ll detour and focus on the shirt designs and getting the store up and running over the next several weeks. So, please leave your comments, let me know if you’re interested, tell everyone you know…