Check Out This Fucking T-Shirt

As we all know, with the emergence of the superhero flicks, this has been a good time for nerd merch. I'm not really one for action figures, but I do keep an eye open for superhero t-shirts. You can find them in pretty much every clothing store in America these days, but most of those are shitty cartoonized versions of movie posters. It's pretty difficult to find a superhero-themed t-shirt that isn't too plain, too ugly, or too event-comic-double-page-spready. I don't need Michael Turner art on a t-shirt.

(We speak ill of the dead here at CotU.)

Basically, a superhero t-shirt needs to be retro. It lends that pop art quality that a Marvel Zombies cover just doesn't have (looking at you, Hot Topic). Also, whoever it is that makes these goddamn things thinks that just by plastering any comic image onto cotton, they have a good t-shirt. Fuck those guys! A comic shirt has to be a GOOD-LOOKING SHIRT that just happens to be comic-related.

That said, check out this fucking t-shirt.



BLAM! Giant-Size X-Men. They aren't lying--they are presented in a large fashion. The art is courtesy of Seventies Dave Cockrum. Mostly. Whoever made this shirt (the tag just says Marvel Comics) slapped an image of Magneto on top of the original cover art. I dunno if it's Cockrum, but it works.

What separates this t-shirt is the little details, though. Fading the image to make it look older isn't new to shirts with old comic art, but it's nice. It just seems better on this one than it seems on a lot of others. But what really works is the lightly-printed interior art on the blue of the shirt.


Now, I'm no X-Men scholar. The only full runs of it that I've read have been Morrison's and Whedon's, and they're the only two that I've liked (Brubaker sucked, Carey sucked, and I won't read Fraction's because of the shitty art). After looking up Proteus in Wikipedia, I discovered that this is John Byrne's work. Aside from Jean and Cyke here at the bottom, Storm shows up down there (I cut her out of the picture because...Storm sucks), and at the top of the shirt you can see what looks to me like Bashee standing next to Colossus-with-his-head-cut-off, both also by Byrne, I would have to assume. All in all, a pretty sweet t-shirt I think, and I wish more of them were this good.