Militant Geek Custom Shirts

At MilitantGeek I see a lot of TShirt designs week in and week out. And while most places have one shirt that’s rather witty or clever its rare when I stumble across a store that I fall in love with. Retropolis, though, is one of those newly discovered finds.

The idea is to take the romance and swashbuckling set design of Flash Gordon, channel it through a talented designer, and then press it onto lovely shirts for the world to wear. Items, like “the Volto-Vac Retro Robot” are simply too unique and wonderful not to celebrate. This unique pieces of art will run you $25.99. However, when compared to the $30+ for yesterday’s Wordart piece, its a bargain.

So this shirt, available appropriately by Giant Robot, depicts what appears an iconic moment from the great French Robot Wars of 1992. As I’m sure you’ll remember, that conflict was fueled by frustrated escargot automatons toiling under snooty Parisian chefs (redundant, I know). The chaos was finally settled when the humans agree to make regular cheese concessions. And then they all donned flannel and listened to Nirvana. Ah yes, I remember it like yesterday.

Robot in the City is $18 from Giant Robot.

As hard as it is to believe, the retired circus monkeys and I take an occasional break from scouring the web for the best in geekdom. And, being the faux rock gods that we are, we get our guitar hero going. We even made a rock playing robot to handle some of the harder songs (Dragonforce, I’m looking in your dexterous direction). Imagine our surprise when we discovered that John Nissen had captured our coolness in this Zazzle store shirt.

Or maybe its just a robot playing guitar. But a plastic guitar slinger can dream, can’t they?

What is the greatest threat to a geek’s wallet? Well, if the sharp and funny designs by Jeremy Kalgreen are any indication it’s his new TShirt shop, WEAR SCIENCE! The quality permeates the offering, from the incredible designs (shown above and below) to favor text that is nearly on par with the crack team of bargin hunters at Woot. Each shirt is accompanied by a LOL description (for example, what follows appears next to the ‘Germ Wrangler’ tee):

Hypothesis: The rapidly fluctuating velocity provided by ciliate locomotion could provide significant riding / wrangling challenges.

This assumes of course subject paramecium could be properly enlarged or researcher scaled down.

Result: Potential for impressing females was radically underestimated.

The store has free standard shipping on orders of $25 or more for the month of November. Also, if you love the clean lines and above-average cleverness of Jeremy’s work make sure to also check out Amorphia Apparel, the parent site. Special thanks to Jeremy for dropping me a note this evening - he’s got some great stuff!

All this week on MilitantGeek we’re scouring the hand-crafted depths of Etsy, a fantastic outlet of unique wonders. While there is a ton of stuff that either isn’t relevant (or just plain ugly) the diligent geek can discover some wonderful treasures to be worn. Here is one of them!

What’s better than a robot tshirt? How about a cute robot t-shirt? That’s what we have here in this 2nd entry for our Etsy geek apparel search. User gerrijo has created a simple, yet iconic tribute to all things that initially seemed like a good idea but then later developed the programmatic capacity to kill. Cool!

The shirt is available for $20. Don’t like the Tee color? That’s the beauty of Etsy’s cabal of clever creators - gerrijo actually encourages you to contact him with special requests. Talk about service!

The guys over at TenBills.com were kind enough to let me know they’ve got a killer promotion going - use the code ‘FREETEEWITHTHREE’ and get a free shirt when you buy three at regular price. And let me be clear when I talk about regular price: I’m talking a eye, popping, wallet pleasing $10 a piece. Last time I checked I couldn’t event go to a movie solo (happens alot) without spending $10. And believe me, the stuff from TenBills is a whole lot more fun to wear than a popcorn bucket.

Take, for example, the fantastic robot design entitled ‘First Flight’ by Michael Phillips. It’s got some incredible detail, a bold/big image, and expresses the kind of euphoria that lead Johnny 5 to declare “I’m Alive!”. Even if you don’t pick this shirt, however, it’s hard to go wrong with Ten Bills. All shirts are exclusively design and sure to please. Remember, use FREETEEWITHTHREE on checkout and tell them the MilitantGeek sent you.

For a limited time Nerdy Shirts is having a sale on all their gear. From now till Monday, August 6th you can get 25% off any of their great designs - including their Transformer reprints!

Past MilitantGeek mentions of Nerdy Shirts:

• More Transformer Shirts!

Last week I briefly mentioned the pending launch of shirt.woot, Woot’s t-a-day site. The thought of applying Woot’s incredible Geek-centric deals with merchandise that one could wear was titillating.

This week they did launch and (so far) it is. Day one featured an extremely lovely gaming homage called ‘Sore Thumbs’. Day two featured an exploded-diagram view of a vaguely Transformers-like robot. If they can continue to keep the quality up (a challenge considering they are expected to induce geek-gasms every single day) they will go straight to the short list of favorite sites.

There have been some complaints that there isn’t a ’so-slow-its-free’ shipping option for the shirts. It will also be interesting to see if Woot’s approach - one-shirt-for-a-limited-time as opposed to a stable catalog - will attract more casual shoppers. But for now its exciting to see such a great resource for impulse geek clothing purchases take shape.

Seen on music videos, commercials, and even shoddily taped wedding receptions the Robot is the dance the refuses to die. Perhaps it is its emphasis on awkward movement that makes it accessible to the masses. Perhaps it’s a misplaced Jetsons-like future yearning that will never be. Perhaps its that damn Styx song that keeps the robot a rigid spasm away.

For whatever reason The Tee Party’s ‘Do the Robot’ captures our delightful cultural dementia one right angle at a time. Men’s shirts are printed on heavyweight cotton and start at $19.99.

Well, this week we’ve been pretty robot heavy, what with all the Transformers this, the Transformers that, and the dreaded Transformers other. So it would only be fitting if we ended the week in similar fashion with this nice little tee from Radioactive Panda. The price is $18 ($15 + $3 shipping in the US) and quite affordable for a clever little design.