Watchmen T-shirts: the best and the rest

Kay — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:04:53 +0000

If you want Rorschach on your front, Forbidden Planet have the best T-shirt of the authorised merchandise: excellent use of colour and fidelity to both the movie and the comic in the design.

While Nite Owl is well presented at Backstreet Merch, if you like that kind of thing, my gut response to this tee is that it’s messy, there’s too much going on and nothing to fix the eye to a central image that lets the rest of the busy stuff settle down around it.

Perhaps I’m biased, Nite Owl is not my fave character and in the movie version he’s even less well-drawn, sliding into a Batman mark II type persona that, I think, shortchanges the compulsive/obsessive nature of the character that Alan Moore gave us.

Both T-shirts are on pre-order, with arrival dates of around 30 March … didn’t it used to be that you could get the tee to wear to the movie opening, or am I being picky?

Post by Kay who can remember ‘Swamp Thing: the movie’ too …

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Coraline T-shirts reviewed

Mikey — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:28:16 +0000

Okay for those of us who give a damn about the world of illustration, which includes animation, graphic novels, street art and all that good stuff, Neil Gaiman has been, along with Alan Moore, a force. A real force. They are both British too, don’t forget that. So when you get two films based on their work premiering in the same year, in fact, the same spring, you get a bit excited.

Not though, by the merchandising. Or at least, not by that being offered by Coraline, the adaptation of Gaiman’s 2002 freakily dark and funny novel. Weirdly, the best of the licensed Coraline stuff on offer is actually a baby’s tee, right here:

The use of colour and image is great – really picks up the way that Gaiman lulls you into a sense of security before sticking a fork in your heart and twisting it, as it were. The best of the rest is simply not so good – this is it, but hmmm – does that seem either freakily dark or funny to you?

Me neither – it’s sort of cute, but nothing like the eerie glory of the film itself, which the baby-top certainly seems to reflect a lot better. The good news is that the film looks much much better than this merching does.

Still, given the rubbish small children are usually forced to wear, I’ll bet there’s some ankle-biters out there boosting their pester power for The Cat With No Name.

Next time, The Watchmen on your front … or back!