John K's T-shirt commercial for Stussy

Stussy x John K. from Stussy on Vimeo.

My pal John Kricfalusi (creator of Ren & Stimpy) made an animated commercial for his T-shirt designs that Stussy released today. I love John's animation work. I asked John to write a bit about the making of the commercial and here's what he had to say:

A couple years ago Stussy put out a bunch of shirts featuring Marvel superheroes.

CrystalandjohnnyStussy's art director Adam Jay Weissman cooked up the idea and asked some non-Marvel artists to do their interpretations of their favorite characters. I picked Crystal and Johnny Storm.

Then last year Adam asked me to design 4 new shirts using my own characters and to redesign their mascot, the Stussy Rat. Once the designs were done they thought it would be fun if I animated a commercial for it. I suggested we make it a story first and include the commercial within and they said yes. I always liked how early television and radio used the stars of their shows to perform the ads for their sponsors and I have been pushing this idea online for a few years now. Finally someone let me do it!

It stars Bobby Bigloaf, a nerdy kid who dreams of one day growing up to be the greatest comic book writer in the world, and Slab N Ernie, the neighborhood bullies.

I used my crack crew of John Kedzie, Sarah Harkey, Geneva Hodgson, Ben Anders, David De Rooij, Sandra Rivas and Amir Avni to make the cartoon.

I drew the storyboards on paper and animated the cartoon using Toonboom's Animate program.