October must be awesome if you’re a fan of wearing tees that have a general whiff of death about them, since it feels like every other e-mail I get at the moment has some kind of a horror/gore/zombie kind of a theme to it. Dance Party Massacre’s second season of tees, ‘Sleep When You’re Dead‘ is probably my favourite of the bunch, I like the way that the text transforms from top to bottom, its a cool effect.
I think this is shaping up to be one of the best Halloween’s ever if you want to wear something that fits the horror bill without making you dress up like this guy (incidentally, he couldn’t get the yellow paint off the next day, and had to go to work looking kinda yellow). Akumu Ink teased me a couple of months ago saying that they were going to start selling hoodies, and I presumed that it would only be an option available on a few designs, but they’ve gone and made their whole range of designs available as hoodies. I think that a lot of the designs, especially Of Horror I, work really well as hoodies, so check ‘em out and see if you agree.
Akumu Ink
If you were running a clothing line that sells designs that are based around zombies, gore, skulls, and pretty much everything else that the Emptees regulars like, when would you release your latest collection?
Halloween of course! Well, slightly before Halloween I guess, since people might actually want to wear this stuff on Halloween, which I’d assume is exactly why Electric Zombie latest range of designs came staggering slowly towards us calling out for brains a couple of days ago.
As well as the totally-terrifying-tees, there are also a couple of hoodies in the range, a fresh belt design, and also a poster package featuring artists Derek Deal, Horsebites, Kyle Crawford (Mr. Electric Zombie), Chris Rushing, and Chad Lenjer.
I think if I’d turned up at school wearing any of the shirts from Electric Zombie I’d have probably been told to go home and get changed, but maybe your principal/headmaster is more embracing of great tees than mine were. If that’s the case, then whip your credit card out (or, if you’re at school, your parent’s credit card), because Electric Zombie are running a big back to school sale. There’s decent savings to be had on almost everything, and whilst quite a few sizes are out of stock at the moment they will be restocking everything (except the $5 tees) in the next few days. The sale will last for another couple of weeks.
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.
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
This brand has far too many great designs for me to just give them a quicktees link, which is why I intend to come back to them at some point in the near future, but I thought I’d let those of you that are interested in movie/horror/zombie/sci-fi tees have a look at them now rather than waiting for me to feature an individual tee. Cool vector art on the site too.
So, ever wanted to wear a horror movie poster on your chest?
Admittedly, this design doesn’t commit seppuku (italicised to make me feel smart) by going the whole hog and putting in words and other movie promo staples, but the image really reminded me of the style of horror movie posters. I’m annoyed at myself for not coming up with a decent description of this tee, because it is quite clearly amazing, but I refuse to go down that line of ‘this tee is so good I don’t need to write about it’ since that’s just lazy blogging. Luckily, writing about my inability to articulate myself counts as writing in my book, so this post is done baby!
Costiness=$21 Link
I don’t really watch many horror movies anymore, not because I’m particularly scared of the content (I’m a man who proudly boasted in his Facebook status of my opinion that Sweeney Todd ‘wasn’t that gory’), just because there aren’t that many premises out there for horror movies that really appeal to me. One of the things that I don’t like about most t-shirt designs that attempt to appeal to horror fans is the way that they seem to be covered with blood splatters and unnecessarily gruesome images, its as if the designers are trying to create an offensive image that, to me, renders it unwearable in most everyday situations. Dance Party Massacre aren’t like that, if you’ll allow me to get poetic for a second, they’re like a breath of fresh air in a haunted house filled with the stench of stale blood (ooooh, dark!).
Let’s get this out of the way at the start, the face-mask glows in the dark. So you know that I’m gonna love this tee, and especially in the context that the thing that’s often so scary about horror movies is that you can’t see the scary thing, so DPM turned that concept on its head by making sure you can always see their object of terror. This design is typical of Dance Party Massacre’s style, they try and put ambiguity and angles for interpretation into each tee and this is no different. In their own words:
There’s evil out there, and in every slasher film it’s represented as the masked psychopath. This is our version of the boogeyman coming for us. And those hands inside of it—are they dancing, or reaching out for help?
In terms of quality, Dance Part Massacre manage to put out a pretty impressive package. In my envelope (I don’t know if they sent me any special freebies) there was the tee, a DPM printed plastic carrier bag, a load of promo postcards, a pin button, and a sticker. There’s big pics of all of them at the bottom of the post. The tee itself feels good, it doesn’t have a stock tag in it but I get the feeling that it might be AA, but I’m not too used to handling Large sized AA tees (no, I haven’t dropped the pounds yet, DPM don’t to up to XL yet) so I could be wrong. The print feels quality too, and I’ll be interested to see how the glow-in-the-dark treatment lasts with multiple washings.
Costiness=$28 Link
It feels as if I’ve been meaning to write about Dance Party Massacre since last Halloween. It would have made a lot more sense since the DPM crew seem to be pretty obsessed with making tees that are all about the horror, whilst trying not to horrify you. But, I guess that since their front page says “everyday is halloween” it doesn’t really matter when I post about this tee.This tee doesn’t really have any of the references to classic movies like most of the other tees in their fledgling range, or even the spilling of copious amounts of blood, but I just really like it for some reason. There’s just so many ways that you can take this tee, be inspired by it, laugh at it, be pseudo-intellectual with it, or look at it as referential to those propaganda posters of WW2. The slightly worn look suits this colourway, I think it might have looked a bit stark if it was just flat colour.
Costiness=$28 Link
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