A few months back SLG  let me know that they were going to be re-printing an old JTHM shirt that was initially put out something around ten thousand years ago, back when I had a corporeal state and still had love in my flesh-heart.  Normally, when they call, I scream something about leaving me alone before throwing the phone against the wall, swiping madly at the air around the now shattered plastic like a fearful caveman at a solar eclipse, but in this case I figured something new was called for.

The shirt is probably one of the more iconic of the ones I’ve ever put out, despite the fact that it wasn’t originally designed to be anything more than the back cover to one of the issues of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, a series I created specifically to make my life a living hell on earth for years to come because that’s just the way I work.  

Problem with that is that the image, ink on bristol board, went straight from the publisher to the shirt elves without much done for the upcoming change in surface material – paper and cotton, if you haven’t noticed, are pretty different in the way they take to drawings filthy with scribbly, thin hatch-work from needle sharp technical pens.  What ended up being printed, and worn by fans here, and on other planets, for years and years was something whose lines got a bit broken up by the transfer, not to mention the ensuing wear and tear as it stretched and pulled over all that awful human meat.

Despite the flaws, the shirt’s popularity has not waned one iota, as is obvious by this small sampling of google image search results for “JTHM shirt”:

 
Now, here’s where the story explodes from the burning dick of the past all over your screaming, terrified face in the present:  SLG had lost the files they had used to send the shirt images to the printer (hardly surprising as the entire operation there is run by creatures that closest resemble those child-beast-like cave trolls from Lord of the Rings and it’s a miracle they can actually operate filing cabinets and office chairs at all) so they contacted me to ask if I had those old files sitting around.

After a wee search, I managed to find the front image of Nny holding the two blades, but not the back image of the hieroglyphics.  Rather than just sending off what I had found, a drawing older than some countries by this point, I decided this would be a fine opportunity to clean the image up a bit, as well as, out of necessity,  completely recreate the hieroglyphic image.  Me, I tend to revise things into oblivion, as exemplified by that Z? mug which started life as a mere coffee mug with a Z? logo stamped onto it and ended up a poisonous work of sculptural art whose fate is still unknown.  

Really though, with the shirt, I just took the chance to turn the drawing into a vector image in Illustrator, and simplified it a bit, removing some of the finer line-work that would simply vanish or break up into rough, crusty patches when transferred to a shirt, and thickening other areas to stand out more clearly.  

Like I said, the original shirt pulled the image straight from the back of the comic book, complete with the hard cut where the figure’s torso is cropped off by the bottom of the page.  On the new shirt, the figure is actually much larger bringing slightly less mechanical cut closer to the bottom of the shirt.

With a design this old, I figured that whoever wanted this shirt probably already picked it up by this point, which made altering things a bit easier, making this sort of a director’s cut shirt, only without fuckin’ Greedo shooting first.  With that in mind, I axed the fishnet style gloves that Nny was wearing in the original as very sight of them made me angry at myself for ever drawing them in the first place.  The hieroglyphics on the back are pretty much the same, just much cleaner and done entirely in Illustrator now.

The last change, probably the tiniest but my favorite, is the addition of the bullet hole scar over Nny’s right eye, missing from the first version of the shirt as that whole event had not gone down yet.   A bit of trivia for the truly psychotic out there: That scar appears in exactly the same spot as one I earned by riding a bike directly into a metal light pole as an absent-minded kid.

I would have just redone the entire shirt, as the style is a bit ‘long ago’ for me, but it is what it is, so there you have it.  

Finally, the thing comes in girl fits as well as guys, so now everyone gets to play.  Not too sure about availability right now.  I hear it’s in stores, but you might want to check with SLG about details.  Don’t let your ex run off with this one this time, yeah?

Thanks to Zoetica for the pic, taken by Stuntkid, at the top of the post.