Every Shirt II: My Pet Demon

shirt: My Pet Demon original logo
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2006
provenance: band

If I recall correctly, I picked this shirt up from the band at the first show I saw Stateside after coming back from Germany, with Ravage and some other bands at the old Peabody Jam Rooms in March of that year. Regardless, this DIY shirt tells as much of a story as any more "pro" design in my pile.

Just looking at this, you see readily the perpetual criticism that a lot of the North Shore metal scene had for MPD between about '03 and '06, namely, that they had gotten really good, and yet were still using a logo -- that had to go on shirts and stage banners -- that they had made out of the Big Internet Book of Scary Fonts when they were high school freshmen back in 2001. Unfortunately, the North Shore scene, as in so many other ways, was underdeveloped relative to the South Shore in terms of artists, and thus there wasn't really an analogue of the indomitable Mark Richards available to redo the logo into something more metal, or at least less "fontsy". Crime Pays had good surrounding design to compensate for the logo, but it wasn't for another year and a half, when Raise The Flag dropped, that MPD finally got a graphic look for the band that matched what they'd been doing musically for most of the past, like, five years previously. There's your "support music, not [ancilliary property x]" for you; whether the band's popularity in that span vindicated their not taking the time to change the logo or whether they might have had more success if they'd changed it earlier is largely in the eye of the beholder.