Interviews from APE: Big Stone Head

I live in the desert where I’m surrounded by saguaro cacti, and I never realized they were flipping me off until I saw it on a t-shirt at the Alternative Press Expo. Now, thanks to Avery Monson and Jory John of Big Stone Head, I’m greeted with hostile cacti every time I leave my house. Here, Avery and Jory explain themselves.

Jory: My name is Jory and along with another guy who’s actually out and about in this convention center, named Avery, we run a site called Big Stone Head. It’s started out as a comic that was basically the travels of these Easter Island stone heads and there were never any jokes in it, each strip was pretty much it’s own. We got it into about 15 college newspapers to start and then we quickly realized that college newspapers don’t give you any money. So then we stopped. Actually, that’s not totally true. We did the comic for a few years, and it kind of ran it’s course. We kept the website name though, and turned it into a general humor blog. We have a lot of comics and basic humor writing. Then pretty early on, we bought this button maker and started making buttons. So we were thinking about ideas that would be good buttons and those ideas became shirts later on.

PRG: Do you sell your shirts exclusively online?

Jory: We sell them on the website and we have them in a few stores. They’re at one boutique in LA and then a couple of stores in San Francisco, 826 Valencia and a store called Little Otsu. It’s one of our goals to get them into a bunch of stores.

PRG: Are you doing all of the distribution and stuff yourselves?

Jory: We’re doing everything, yeah.

PRG: Do you print them yourselves or are you going through a printer?

Jory: We used to print them ourselves, but now we do the design and send them out to a couple different places. One is called Mammoth Printshop and it’s somewhere in Alabama. We’ve never met the people but we’ve worked with them for a number of years and they do really good work. They print these labels on the inside. Here’s Avery, he’s the other guy.

Avery: We write all of the stuff together on the site and I do the art on it.

PRG: Is it vector based illustration?

Avery: Almost all of it. I’ve never been trained in art, I’m actually an actor. I come from like an improv comedy background. This is all just doodles and stuff.

PRG: Do you have an improv troupe that you work with?

Avery: I just moved up from LA and I was doing the Upright Citizen’s Brigade theater down there.

PRG: Do you aspire to anything longer, like a book or a screenplay, or like a series of t-shirts, where you have to buy them all to get the whole story?

Avery: Maybe. Jory and I are always tossing around ideas for longer things. We’ve been talking about binding the shirts into a book.

Buy a t-shirt from Big Stone Head and wonder if people are laughing at your shirt, or that thing hanging out of your nose. Oh, wait. That is your nose.

Never miss an interview. Subscribe to Pink Raygun by Email, or Subscribe via RSS