Well we’ve hit our final Fall-1 T-shirt design… Secret Weapon!

I love Military nose art, I think it’s one of the first widely accepted examples of art re-apropriation or what’s most commonly referred to as a “flip” in streewear. There was a strong penchant for Warner & Universal cartoon characters whose archetypes conveyed perfectly well the cavalier attitudes of the pilots. The art was usually crude and the characters demeanors ranged from confrontational to overtly sexual, quite the sordid little contrast from their cartoon film persona!

Being that the Skyway Trippers were pilots i wanted to do a design around some pretty traditional nose art. Woody Woodpecker and his thumbing his nose at authority attitude was a pretty popular choice amongst pilots to represent them on the side of their plane. And while Woody appeared in countless nose art renderings, the most classic one to me is of him popping out of the bomb asking you to “keep a secret”. It’s a pretty classic image (at last to me) ripe to be played with! And while unfortunate, it’s no surprise that it was also used as the basis of a design by another artist/label around the same time. While keeping mostly true to the original nose art graphic we did re-draw it to fit our theme and just Mishka more by making Woody into a cyclops ala Simon and then adding our own Simon skull & crossbones to our secret weapon!

- My Pal the Crook