Cactus shirt

This is the second post in my shirts series, in my first post I told about the hobby I had twenty years ago, drawing on shirts. Since they have started falling to pieces and I can’t make myself throw them out I decided to write about them so that they can live on in digital form and I can reclaim some wardrobe space.

This is one of my first shirts so there are a few unforced errors which I attempted to cover up.

The Front

On the front I have my Abrahamic character drinking from a decapitated cactus with the caption “Enjoy Cactus Cola, the Sheik’s thing”. This is a play on Coca Cola’s slogan and the similarity between Sheik and Chic. Since this is a cactus the sheik’s hand is obviously bleeding. One of the reasons I’ve stopped wearing this shirt at home is that my children find the blood very disturbing and can’t help but comment about it whenever they see the shirt.

I then got a stain in the centre of the shirt and had to cover it up, I chose a skull and crossbones with the warning

Use of this product may prove hazardous to haemophiliacs

The Back

 

The back of the shirt is a bit of a hodgepodge of desert-based jokes.

I have the character from the front of the shirt crawling towards a mirage. You’ll notice that he has a star and crescent armband, this is to cover up my second error where I initially draw the arm as some kind of Möbius strip.

Next to the mirage is the skeleton of a fish (complete with the skeleton of bubbles coming out of its mouth). The idea was that the fish came to live in the mirage and died since there wasn’t really any water there (what can I say I thought it was amusing at the time).

The sun is wearing sunglasses as is its wont and drinking from a can of Mercury with a straw (mercury being both a liquid and a celestial body). The can of mercury is labelled with both its astrological and chemical symbol, I should note that this was before I heard of the Mercury company I later worked for.

Next to that is the skeleton of Joe Camel who died of lung cancer (I thought that was edgy at the time) and a dog gnawing on one of its bones.

And to complete the plethora of pathetic puns are the Cacti family with the Mother cactus, father cactus and their son showing off his muscles.