TopatoCo: We Sell T-shirts by the e-Shore

What Manner of Product Interests You Today, Noble Patron?

A Log of Occurrences and Events Presented in Reverse-Chronological Order Follows

TopatoCo: The PLACE for ITEMS

November 5th, 2009 by Malki

You know TopatoCo as a place for leisure and business wear; adornment for boudoir and church alike; vending every manner of fine chemises appropriate for the classroom or the courtroom; offering fine apparel of every variety except tank tops and tuxedoes (stay tuned).

But we also got things! And now is the time to point out a bunch of them specifically. Up there you see a picture of the Poop Sign, by our friend and mankind’s enemy Chris Yates. If somehow its image does not immediately convey its meaning, perhaps this video will clear your sinuses of confusion:

So that settles that!

ALSO we got unique holiday cards! Now, for the first time in basically ever, via one single convenient hyperlink you can buy greeting cards from Dinosaur Comics, Sheldon, Cat & Girl, Wondermark, Little Gamers, Sam & Fuzzy — we are your PLACE for HOLIDAY CARDS. The holidays are coming up! Do not wait to buy these, in honesty we will probably run out at some point and you will be left high and dry.

Do you like animals? How about non-living animals you can cuddle with? Bohda Te’s got two new plush animals which were never even alive, ever, so chill out, anti-taxidermy activists. It is a regular and understood thing for there to be animals stuffed with cotton or other that can be cuddled with and adorabled. Here is one and here is the other for your enjoyment and purchasing and forever-love!

And we also got some very good new messenger bags! There is one from A Softer World talking about zombies and one from Wondermark talking about knitting, but both presuppose a situation of emergency and both are good for carrying basically any goods that need carrying over a shoulder or being slung jauntily across a body. These are rugged canvas, super stylish and handy for messengers or really anyone at all with a suitable torso. I’m looking at you-oo-ou!

“Another Open House? Don’t you guys have friends?”

November 2nd, 2009 by Holly

Yes! Yes we do have friends, and they are coming over on November 14th to mingle with ‘the people’. We’ll all be hanging out from 12 to 6 at TopatoCo HQ. Come say hello, grab some cheap clearance stuff, start your holiday shopping early, bring us cupcakes to soak up the hootch.

Sam Brown found out the hard way that the US Postal Service does not appreciate a package that says, “Exploding Dog” on it – even when you try to explain that it’s your comic and you’re famous on the internet. So he hitched his wagon to the TopatoCo wagon train because somebody told him that we know where we’re going. If you walk up to him and say a random phrase, he will make a comic out of it! This proves awkward for Sam when he is walking through New York City as he ends up handing out a lot of comics to hobos.

Andrew Hussie is a mad genius who lives in a secret lair under the MBTA tunnels of Boston. He spends all of his waking hours updating MS Paint Adventures and plotting revenge on his nemesis, Ryan North. Eschewing food and sunlight, he will not rest until MSPA is so huge that it takes over the entire internet. He is about 45% of the way there.

Local Hero Jeph Jacques was recently thought missing, until his wife heard a muffled crying coming from underneath a pile of fancy guitars and pulled him to safety. He chronicled his brave journey in the Oprah’s Book Club selection “A Million Little Picks”, and is now back from sailing around the world in time to hang out with us and resume work on his opus. Coming in from out of town? You can take the Questionable Content Tour through downtown Northampton while you are here. I am told that is a Thing.

Jeffrey Rowland is the creator of the popular webcomics Overcompensating and Wigu. He accidentally built an innovative and successful business with the webcomics merchandise distribution juggernaut TopatoCo, and now he doesn’t sleep very much. He lives in Massachusetts in a fortified bunker that he keeps stocked with taco fixin’s and the kind of beer that only old men drink. He’s pretty happy as long as those stupid butt cats keep quiet.

fiesta!

TopatoCo presents Maximum Fun!

October 21st, 2009 by Malki

In our unending mission to tighten our fierce, talon-like tentacles around every good thing extant on the six and a half normal internets, we have just taken one giant leap closer to total global domination. TopatoCo is proud to unveil the MaxFunStore, featuring all kinds of crazy products from MaximumFun.org.

WHAT IS MAXIMUM FUN? You mean you don’t know? Maximum Fun is the internet home of Jesse Thorn, who has a show on the radio and the podcasts called The Sound of Young America, on which he interviews everybody ever in the world of comedy, music and entertainment. Like, literally everybody from Andrew W.K. to Zach Galifianakis. Then he’s got a thing called Jordan, Jesse, Go! which is a comedy podcast where John Hodgman is a recurring character as an all-powerful judge. That is just par for the course in Jesse Thorn’s world.

Also he is a nerd about dressing nice so all his products are printed on the super-duper-premium Alternative Apparel brand. He’s got our first-ever embroidered polo as well as a hoodie he claims you will want to know carnally, it is so freaking soft.

Also Jesse’s doing some of his comedian friends a solid and offering products for them too: Andy Daly’s Mustache TV, which is America’s Number One Television-Based Mustache Game For Parties, and a logo shirt for Kasper Hauser, who are sketch comedy geniuses.

Now, here is the thing. As a public-radio person, Jesse is used to doing pledge-drives and asking for donations. We’re pleased to guide him on this critical step away from Communism and into the vagaries of the free market. LET US MAKE IT HAPPEN AT ONCE

TopatoCo at APE 2009

October 6th, 2009 by Malki

TopatoCo’s coming to your town! As long as your town is San Francisco. The whole clattering tinker-carriage is pulling up to the Concourse Exhibition Center on October 17-18 for the hundredth annual Alternative Press Expo. We probably won’t have earrings made of Scrabble tiles or Members Only jackets with Black Flag iron-on patches, but we will be bringing our finely-tuned sense of East Coast joie de vivre to your foggy, bebridged moors.

We’re going to be at tables 254-256 and we’re going to have a staggered signing schedule so we can make sure nobody gets rickets from sitting too long. Check out this boss PDF map for a whole list of times and locations and names and pretty much everything you need to get going. Oh and don’t forget if you have a San Diego Comic-Con pass, you get in the door of APE for bupkis!

walkin' it up At TopatoCo Central we’re gonna have: Matt Boyd • Joey Comeau & Emily Horne • Meredith Gran • Chris Hastings • Jon Rosenberg • Jeffrey Rowland • Zach Weiner • plus favorite merch from our other creators who can’t make the trip due to outstanding warrants or other similar reasons.

Also we should mention that Kate Beaton will be in the building, but not at our table — she’s over at table 440. And even good ol’ Brandon Bird will be right nearby at table 258! That’s all noted on our map though so don’t even worry about it. UPDATE: Now we even got Aaron Diaz on that thing holdin’ down table 251!

all right now we got to figure out if we need a passport to get into San Francisco and what kind of extradition treaties they got just in case of, you know

trouble

(APE 2008 photo above by lobraumeister, used under CC)

September 26 Tag Sale! For Great Justice; MAD DISCOUNTZ

September 19th, 2009 by Malki

so much stuff The thing about running a T-shirt manufactury is that you end up with a lot of merchandise. Everything’s gotta be printed in all these different sizes, and there are different color options, and even a small number of designs can permute out into irrational numbers of actual product.

And we ain’t no second-rate ham-shop runnin’ T-shirts out the back of an off-label methadone distillery either — we’re the world’s largest graphical internet entertainment licensing firm, and we got literally twenty dozen different designs that we throw away on a daily basis. We are straight-up and down-low professional and the side effect of all this legitimate-businessin’ is that we got tee-shirts in every orifice and stacked up to reach the danged rafters.

Solution? TAG SALE. We’ve got bins, crates and barrels (curiously, no boxes) full of limited, discontinued, overstocked and/or clearance merchandise that we want to get rid of. This Saturday, September 26, we are opening our doors and urging you, a bunch of strangers, to come paw through a giant stash of our clean cotton miscellany. That’s right — the TopatoCo offices will be open to the discount-loving public for a one-day bargain-basement housecleaning hootenanny.

Everything will be marked down to prices that may make us cry — but as our intrepid leader Jeffrey continually sneers, “We have to give them bargains so they will like us!” This is an important step in our social development so we just ask that you please not bring any airhorns or we may become spooked and bolt.

So join us on Saturday from 10 AM till 7 PM. The address is: 116 Pleasant St., Ste. 203, Easthampton MA 01027. Google’s got a map of it right here. It’ll be great bargains on a pile of great stuff for you, and maybe finally clearing enough space to meet the fire code for us. Sounds like a win-win.