When I was working in Tokyo, I saw trucks sporting one of my favorite logos of all time... for a company named Yamato Transport.

They're a popular shipping and moving company in Japan, and their logo has a mom black cat (kuro-neko) carrying a baby black cat. Thus implying that they will take care of your goods as a mother takes care of her child...

Total genius, really.

Anyway... in my Facebook feed was an ad for a T-shirt with the logo on it so I jumped at it. Except it's not officially licensed like so many scams that Facebook allows to run as ads (I got scammed by a Marine Layer imitator because Facebook is an asshole company*). And so I wrote to Yamato Transport directly and asked if they sell shirts with their logo.

Probably won't hear back, but I had to try because I want that shirt!

   
*I bought a shirt and sweatshirt from Marine Layer and absolutely loved them. So when Facebook showed me an ad for a Marine Layer summer clearance sale, I hopped on it. But since Facebook doesn't give a shit about anything but money, the ad wasn't vetted and turned out to be a scam. A fake company using a duplicate of the Marine Layer site... even sending out a Marine Layer branded confirmation. When I didn't get a ship notification or my order after two weeks, I found that none of the support links in the email work. Fortunately I was able to dispute the transaction. But WTF Facebook? Why not go after advertisers the way you go after your users? Oh... that's right... BECAUSE MONEY!

The ad is STILL RUNNING.

Avitable has announced this year's theme for his annual Halloween bash, and it's a good one: INVADED!

Like last year, Adam asked me to create a T-shirt design to help raise money for the party, and with an awesome theme like "alien invasion," I could hardly say no. The challenge would be to find a new way of having fun with the DaveToon characters so that I wouldn't be bored. After a little thought, I decided to try an old "Sci-Fi Comic Book" design and see if I could make that work. All the best alien invasion stuff could be found in the pulp comics and films of yesteryear, so it seemed like a good fit.

After an hour of goofing around, this is what I came up with...

If you want to support the Avitaween party (or just want to look really cool), you can buy the shirt at Adam's Zazzle Shop.

If you want a behind-the-scenes peek at how the design was created, I've got that in an extended entry...