A perennial favorite around Preshrunk HQ is the web comic Toothpaste For Dinner. Drawn by a man known only to his fans as Drew, his acerbic wit and ammusing observations make for a great daily read. Drew and friends recently launced Sharing Machine, a distribution service for independent artists. With such clients as Mule Design and Kompressor, the future seems rather bright for them.

Since Drew is a self-confessed t-shirt junkie, he’s got a whole bunch of great tees floating around his closet. Fortunately for us, he was nice enough to send us some of his favorite shirts for our readers perusal.
Here Comes A Special Boy

This is from Achewood, my favorite comic strip, online or off. It has been my favorite for years, because Chris Onstad is a raw comic genius. This shirt is great, because it has a creepily-optimistic message, and then a little otter running around, and I think sometimes people mistake the otter for a weiner running around, and that makes it even better.

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Hot Dog

I bought this shirt off a guy in the netherlands, who posted on a messageboard that he was making these shirts. Sight unseen, I paypalled him some euros, and got this shirt a bit later. If you are addicted to weird t-shirts like I am then sending ten or fifteen bucks out of the country in exchange for a t-shirt is not much of a stretch at all. As it happens, the screenprinter [Probably high, that’s the idea most Americans have of the dutch] printed the design upside down and I got the shirt at a discount, and it is even weirder to have a shirt with an upside-down hotdog. If you are reading this, thanks Neils.
Ming & Ping

Ming & Ping are a synth-pop duo from California. They make new-new-wave music and they are twins. This shirt was too
awesome for me to even think about passing up. I don’t really even listen to this sort of music much, but theirs is strangely compelling. Their website is mingping.com, and their album is called mingping.com. Huh.

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Optigan

The Optigan was a home organ manufactured in the 1970s by Mattel. It used these twelve-inch clear acetate disks, printed with amplitude-modulated sound loops – the same idea as the sound stripe on film, but in a circle. These organs were basically failures, prone to electrical and mechanical problems, but were built at a factory in Compton [yes, that Compton] for a few years.

I had an Optigan a few years ago. I bought it at a thrift store for $12 in 1998-ish near my parents’ house, and my dad helped my tie it into my old Honda with bungee cords. I drove it half sticking out of my trunk back to my ghetto apartment in Cincinnati, where I played it for a couple of years. Then I discovered eBay and promptly sold the thing for three hundred bucks to some cats from New York. Now all I have is this t-shirt, which I bought on a lark from optigan.com at the same time as a huge packet of service manuals I needed to restore the thing to playable condition. The shirt, thankfully, has not required hours of maintenance every few months to remain wearable.

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Thanks for giving us a peek at your favorite tees, Drew! For those of you that care, we’ve got another great “What’s In Your Closet?” coming up on Friday from one of our favorite weblogging sci-fi authors. Hope to see you then!