I am proud to say that the little robot I drew for the site has inspired Tony to do some blogging, a friend to ask me to draw another robot on commission (of beer or sweatshirts), and Dan to request Doombot business cards. All this artsy-craftsy stuff has got some of us thinking about t-shirts, too, which resulted in some interesting conversations about how one might go about doing that.

As Hamed and Dan can attest, I have a pretty lousy track record at making t-shirts in a timely fashion. So, given my general cursed nature in this arena, I’ll probably keep doing what it is I do day in and day out and not make stuff (besides blog posts) for Doombot, for the time being at least. But if I were to make stuff, I’d make t-shirts, zippered hoodies (the most versatile article of clothing known to humankind), and beard badges. I don’t know that there would be enough demand for actual “merchandise” per se, rather than just general “craftiness.” But in my fantasy world where I am not doing schoolwork and playing bar trivia games all the time, that is what I would do.

That is not all I would make in my hypothetical fantasy world. No sir. I would also get to design The Complete Buttercup Festival. Buttercup Festival is one of the best comic strips I have ever read, and it deserves the same kind of republication treatment that Krazy Kat and Peanuts are now finally getting. Currently, three of its volumes exist as tape-bound collections of copy paper printed up at Kinkos, sold once upon a time by my friend Dave in the UMass Amherst Campus Center. Two more volumes and numerous color drawings are available online at the ButtercupFestival.com archive. This could all fit in a book or two, and I’ve had a million ideas on how to package it. It was wise of Dave to ignore this offer when I first made it some years ago, as I knew basically nothing about graphic design at that point. Even then, I suspect he could’ve taken it to Top Shelf and Drawn and Quarterly—or maybe he did, and they were crazy not to snatch it up. I only remember him taking it to Highwater Press, which was probably not a good fit at the time, and I think is now defunct. Anyway, yeah: in my fantasy world, I’d get to dress up Buttercup Festival for the world.

In your own hypothetical fantasy world (which must still at least be bound to the laws of physics and kinda-sorta to economics), what would you want to make?