T-shirt #309 - TPTA Corporate Olympics - Shirt A

T-shirt #309 - TPTA Corporate Olympics - Shirt A

Today's shirt is another gift from my father from the years that TPTA participated in the local Corporate Olympics. I have two, so expect to see another.

Not much to say, hence the ...

HIATUS TEXT: I am taking a short hiatus. A "hiatus" for the 365 T-shirts Blog does not mean that there will not be shirts or that I will skip posting on any forthcoming day. There will be shirts. But the shirts will not be exciting or the featured shirts will not require me to write a small novel to properly generate the content I feel is sufficient. I created a category for my hiatus so as to group together those "easy" shirts that I consider to be "hiatus shirts." The goal of the hiatus is to fill in many blog days with easy shirts in order to complete longer love letters to beloved popular culture icons on more special shirts and to write more complex entries AHEAD OF TIME. The daily grind is becoming too much and causing me to fall behind and to be forced to post incomplete entries. I am hoping that a series of hiatus shirts will allow me to catch up, get ahead, and stay ahead. Ideally, I would like to be writing the bulk of each entry three days ahead while always working on at least one other. I have a lot of great shirts to share before the end of my blog year (after all I was just given SIXTEEN shirts for my birthday). Stay tuned. I promise to post the more interesting and longer T-shirt entries as I finish them. Thanks for reading. BTW, this is the standard HIATUS TEXT that I will include in every "hiatus shirt" entry.

Have we established that I am not always wearing the shirt I am featuring that day? Below I have assembled seven images of the shirts I have worn this week, including the one I am wearing right now (the United Federation of Planets Logo).

Perhaps, this is interesting...

Maybe I will do this kind of thing more often.

THIS WEEK'S SHIRTS

 
WHY T-SHIRTS EXPLANATORY BLURB

I am doing a series of snippets that will add up to a larger whole answering the "Why T-shirts?" or "What's with all the T-shirts?" question. I have also decided to include the previous items in an ever growing list, hence the "previous items" section next.

PREVIOUS ITEMS
#1: T-SHIRTS ARE COOL

TODAY'S ITEM - WHY T-SHIRTS #2: I BE BRANDED - CHOOSING TO ADVERTISE

When I taught media studies, I taught from a book called No Logo, in which the author, "took aim at the brand bullies" and discusses the impact of brand-oriented corporate activity and the ways in which people have chosen to fight back, such as Culture Jamming.

Since I was in a different T-shirt in every class, always showing off some comic book logo or musical artist, I would have been a huge hypocrite if advocated for NO LOGOS. Instead I advocated for making conscious choices and owning one's choices. After all, wearing a T-shirt with something printed on it is choosing to be a walking, traveling, interacting billboard for whatever "brand" is displayed on the shirt. I talked about why I wanted to promote this comic book or that musical artist, and I asked the to question if they really wanted to pay their own money to advertise that beer, that school. or that clothing company. Because that's what this is all about: we spend our own money to advertise for other corporate interests.

The above set of shirts from last week show that I paid (or was gifted) about $140 worth of clothing to advertise a podcast, a TV cartoon character, a VERTIGO comic book, a phrase from a set of fantasy books, a comic book character in a logo style of a TV show from the 1960s, a magic company, and a fictional organization in a science fiction TV show. I am purposefully not naming them all in my list to see if you can figure them all out. If you care that is.

So the question is: why would I choose to spend my own money to be an advertisement?

I mean if I am going to pay to have the privilege to advertise I better have some damn good reasons for doing so, and thus I will explore these ideas more in tomorrow's WHY T-SHIRTS post. Also, postscript, it is possible that I will add to this posting after I publish it. After all, I added I sentence to yesterday's, which means I should post the entire WHY T-SHIRTS? essay all together when it's complete.

WEEKLY COMICS LIST

I gave a lot of thought to keeping The Walking Dead in my number one slot. I almost dropped it. This week made for many tough choices. I loved the first issue of Black Widow (even though I suspect Marvel of trying to compete with Image's Velvet), and as you can see, it jumped from the seventh slot two weeks ago to number two and almost number one.

Excited for the new Invaders comic and with good reviews by some tough readers at the comic book store, I log in the All New Invaders comic at number three. The rest of the top six-seven all look good and were close calls in the rankings. Batman falling to ninth may change as I start to work my way through the stack.

I am proud to have cleared the back log enough that there are no issues from this week that go straight to back log.

And on the strength of many recommendations, I am buying Unwritten to give it a go. I just finished Nowhere Men last night and added it to my large stack of comics and graphic novels that I want to review on my blog. For now, just this week's list.

COMICS FOR 1401.22

The Walking Dead #120
Black Widow #002
All New Invaders #001
Mighty Avengers #005
All-New X-Men #022.NOW
X-Men #009
Captain America #015
Hawkeye #016
Batman #27
Avengers World #002
Avengers #025
FF #016
Iron Man #020.INH
The Man of Bronze: Doc Savage #2 (DYNAMITE)
Deadly Class #1 (IMAGE: Remender, Criag, Loughridge)
Justice League #27
Birds of Prey #27
Wonder Woman #27
Cataclysm: Ultimate Comics: X-Men #003
Indestructible Hulk #018.INH

NO BACKLOG!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SPECIAL PURCHASE

Unwritten volume one (Carey/Gross-VERTIGO)

COUNTDOWN TO END OF THE BLOG YEAR - 56 shirts remaining

- chris tower - 1401.24 - 19:41