I don’t think it would come as any great surprise (or at least it shouldn’t) that Hook-Ups was a huge influence on me and in turn Mishka. I used to buy and wear their T-shirts religiously growing up. The amazing color palette, the cartoon/comic based graphics & of course the sexual innuendo, questionable virtue & controversial content of most of those graphics are all things you can safely say rubbed off on us as a brand and in our graphic identity. The very timely use of Anime, the overtly sexual, yet strong female characters their graphics portrayed was so enticing and taboo, it was like a T-shirt graphic version of Heavy Metal magazine re-imagined for the 90s. Which brings us to our next tee preview… Overfiend!

Overfiend is very much our homage to those over the top Hook-Ups graphics of the 1990s. Like those designs of yesteryear we stuck with an anime theme, some sexual innuendo, a dash of nudity and of course some heroic and harrowing characters (a Psionic Overfiend & a Sexy Galactic Guardian) from some non-existing moment out of some non-existing tale, which was something I always loved about Hook-Ups graphics. Even though most tees were just stand alone designs with characters only ever appearing on that one t-shirts, they were so well executed that you totally could (and would) start developing some sort of back-story or mythology (albeit in all likelihood a pretty perverted one) from that one image! That’s what we tried to do here with the Overfiend Tee. What’s going on!? Well it’s really up to you to place this frame/panel within the context of whatever story you choose to build around it!

We’re gong to take a break from Fall-1 2008 T-Shirt previews over the weekend. We’ll be back with our regularly scheduled post of Part 6 come Monday!