The Return of Zombie Beavers
Well, it seems like a good time to bring this concept back. I've been making a version of this design since way back before I started my business officially.
My original "Greetings from Canada" design was a failed submission to Threadless — remember Threadless? I had just bought myself a second-hand Wacom tablet, and having something printed by Threadless (or anybody, really) was my ultimate goal. But in the end, this was rejected. I still thought it was worth printing, and since I was experimenting with printing t-shirts myself at a small co-operative print studio in Halifax called Inkstorm (now called Radstorm), I gave it a shot.
They didn't have a t-shirt press, so in order to print two-colour shirts, I would stretch the shirts on hand-cut cardboard forms, print the first colour flat on a table, wait for that colour to dry, and then print the second colour. The registration was... spotty. But people seemed to like the shirt. 
In fact, of all the shirts I've made over the last 15 years, this design has been the most embraced by the celebrity elite:
Professional wrestling's The Edge
Brendan Canning from Broken Social Scene
Eric Andre from Movies and Television
A smarter businessperson would probably see this as a success, keep on printing it, and sit back to watch the $$ roll in... But I am not a smart businessperson — I am a fickle and frustrating artist. And there are parts of this illustration that I'm just not happy with anymore, so I stopped printing it.
About 8 years ago, I tried to revise the illustration and came up with this:
I like the lettering on this one much more, but this design never took off like the first one — although some people liked it:
My Mom
My Dad
I retired version 2.0 pretty quickly, so if you have one of these, it's a real rarity. This brings us to 2025, and it seems like a good time to revive the idea again. So I set out to make the gnarliest, nastiest, slobberiest Zombie Beaver I could manage. I’ve moved away from using a digital tablet these days, and this illustration was made using old-fashioned pen and paper. The type is a combination of hand lettering and collage.
Pen and ink (Lettering was changed in the final version)
I am really happy with this latest (hopefully final) version, and hopefully you are too. This is the second revised version of an old design I have done this year (see Sad Broccoli). They have been received well so far, perhaps I'll revisit some more oldies.
I’ll end with a quote from Ira Glass that’s always stuck with me:
“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap… It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”
I don’t think I’ve fully closed that gap yet—but I’m getting there.
T-Shirt available here | Stickers here