Here’s the latest and greatest from the robot-lovers over at
Terratag, this time around they’ve got Tokyoplastic to do the designing for them, and I think he’s done a pretty tidy job. The mix between the halftones and the solid-colour blood splashes works really well.
Costiness=£20 Buy it at Terratag
To me, the character design on Tokyo Massacre is pretty cute, yes, she’s holding a chainsaw, but at the same time, its a pretty cute style. Maybe I’m starting to get a bit dark if I think that anyone wielding a chainsaw can be cute, please shout at me if the blog starts getting too gothy (“dudes, this glow in the glow in the dark tee would go great with my pentagram necklace, ring, and belt buckle!”).
The second design that Akumu Ink released this month looks like someone decided to put a chess board on your chest with a razor blade, and even gothy old Andy thinks that this may well be a little dark, but I do quite like it. The tee is called Shukketsu, any chance a Japanese speaker in the audience could enlighten us?
Oh, and they promise they’ll have hoodies on sale next month, huzzah!
Akumu Ink
Before I talk about Electric Zombie, may I just applaud myself for what I think might be the cleverest post title I’ve written in a long time?
Electric Zombie have got some really cool designs, many of which can be seen in the gallery above, which vary from downright gruesome bloody faces to the hilarity of cartoon-y body parts emerging from some kind of green ooze. You couldn’t accuse them of being shrinking violets either, almost all the designs have an oversized print, which I think really works well with their style. The prices are decent too, never topping $20 and a couple of tees are just $6.13.
Electric Zombie
I have to make a little admission about this tee before I get to the meat of the review. Usually, when someone e-mails me and asks if I’d like a sample, I tell them my size (although I do tell people to send whatever size they want), my address, and I don’t pick a design to be sent to me. I didn’t do that with
Akumu Ink, I asked them to send me this design (I didn’t insist upon it, it was just a request) because I really liked its look, and I thought that a detailed print like this would test AIs mettle.
In what seems to be a recurring theme, I wore this t-shirt on a night out with my friends so that I could get the opinions of people that don’t spend all their time writing about t-shirts, thinking about t-shirts and talking about t-shirts. They all liked it, hell, even my mother liked it, which surprised me since a t-shirt with a horror theme could be a bit heavy for some people, I think that the print is a genuinely arresting image, and printing it in blood red could make a few people a bit uncomfortable. But if you’re into this style of design, which I am, it is very easy to like, especially with the use of negative space being used so effectively.
Like I said in the first paragraph, part of the reason why I asked Akumu Ink to send this t-shirt was because I thought that the print would be a decent test of their printing skills, or at least the skills of their printers if they get some other company to do it. They passed the test with flying colours, although I guess that in the case of this tee its just flying colour, but they still did a damn good job anyway. The print is pretty thick, ensuring that the colour is solid and vibrant, so I guess there could be some cracking issues down the line, but it would be a long way down the line, so you probably don’t have much to worry about. The t-shirt
itself.is of AA stock, so its fair to say that you know what to expect there. One cool little extra for this tee is the toe tag that has been attached to the hang tag. It is customised for each order, stating your name, place of death (your address), what caused your death (the name of the t-shirt) and a case number (your order number presumably,mine said ‘666′). One word of warning, there’s a pretty large logo print on the lower back, which I’m sure some of you will hate.
Costiness=$21 Link
