Since the mid-2000s, Mishka NYC has been at the vanguard of popular streetwear. A cornerstone of their success has been designing clothing influenced by gonzo horror, Z-grade sci-fi, and the overall dank and stanky underbelly of pop culture. Indeed, their gear is worn with equal aplomb by metalheads and hip-hoppers (Lil Jon and Lady Sovereign have sported Mishka in music videos), and the label's past collaborators have ranged from everyone from Iron Maiden album artist Derek Riggs to erotic photographer Ellen Stagg to electro-reggae supergroup Major Lazer.

Label heads Mikhail "Mike" Bortnik and Greg Rivera were nice enough to sit down with io9 and answer some questions about Mishka's design philosophy, winter line, and how Stan Lee cold lamps it at Comic-Con:

What's the Mishka origin story?

Mikhail Bortnik (left): It started sometime in '03. My job I was working at was going to close, so I decided to take a stab at t-shirt design, which I had wanted to do since college. This was about the same time I met Greg. A few months into it, I realized I was in over my head so I asked Greg to join on-board and sell the line. Greg immediately came on as a full-time partner. The basic idea was we wanted to sell street wear, but we soon realized there were so many fans who were into both street wear and scifi that there was absolutely no reason we couldn't incorporate these two things.

In terms of scifi, what were your earliest influences?

Greg Rivera (right): A lot of our influences have come from B-horror films, straight-up scifi films, and comic books, especially for Mike. I was big into horror comics when I was kid and also things like The Twilight Zone, Tales from the Darkside, anything with the ironic twist at the end. Both of us are also big toy fans. Being in our early thirties, we grew up with 1980s toys, which ended up being a huge influence in our designs.

MB: One example of this influence was in our Fall 2008 Skyway Trippers collection – we tweaked an Israeli Special Forces design to include the phrase "Spaceknights" in Russian, as a homage to the old Spaceknights comic and toy line.

ROM Spaceknight allusions? That's wild. On a similar note, Mishka has a roster of kaiju-like characters who appears on a lot of your apparel – i.e. the half-serpentine, half-ursine Death Adder and the Cyco Simon skull. What's the story behind them?

MB: Actually the notion of bringing characters into the clothing brand goes back to metal bands. Cyco Simon is a reference to [Megadeth's ] Vic Rattlehead and Eddie from Iron Maiden, and we wanted our own. As for the Death Adder, we use our designs to tell a story with him – he's often seen teaming up with our Soviet super-soldier character.

Are we going to see an Adult Swim series with these guys anytime soon?

MB: I'll be honest, Greg and I would love to be able to a comic book or cartoon series with them.

What was the first sci-fi influenced Mishka piece?

GR: "They Live" was probably one of the first ones. It's hard to remember since we've had so many designs over time.

One of my early favorites was your Judge Death-inspired "Kill Motherfucking Depeche Mode" logo.

MB: That was a mixing of the old Brian Bolland artwork with what people guessed [what the name of German industrial band] KMFDM stood for. KMFDM actually gave us a cease-and-desist for that one.

Really? Not the 2000 AD people?

MB: We figured we'd get something from them or Depeche Mode, but no, it was from the KMFDM people!

On a similar note, when was that moment when you said to yourselves, "Holy crap. We can't believe we just put that on a t-shirt."

MB: The "Tom of Eternia" t-shirt.

GR: Mike had the idea of doing a Tom of Finland-style shirt [featuring He-Man].

MB: If you've never hear of Tom of Finland, he's like the homoerotic artist. There was this impetus [to create this shirt] early on when someone made the comment that all we do is put naked girls and 80s cartoon characters on our shirts. Street wear on a whole seems more macho than we are as a brand, so Greg and I were like, let's do this.

GR: Our friend Robin Nishio – who is this amazing illustrator – met up with us and Mike pitched him the idea. Robin actually went and bought two big books on Tom of Finland and aped the style exactly. That was the coolest because we got so much shit from our customers because it was like, "Here's Skeletor as the master and He-Man down on his knees, gay porn style."

What sort of pieces are in the pipeline at the moment?

GR: We did this series of shirts for [the new heavy metal-themed video game] Brutal Legend and we're working with Dark Horse Comics on a project.

Oh wow, are you at the liberty to talk about that right now?

MB: Not really, but if anyone has followed our brand, you'll know that one particular Dark Horse character particularly sticks out.

As far as the Winter 2009 line goes, you seem to have strong robot theme going. You have the Terminator cyclops, the Decepticon hearse, and my favorite, the Ultron bear. Why robots this season?

MB: We've gone so far doing themes that this season just happened to be robots. This was probably one of our most rigid designs themes. The Ultron shirt's been particularly popular.

You guys hit up the San Diego Comic-Con this year. How was it being a street wear brand at what's been historically a comic and scifi show?

MB: We were selling some things there, but we were mostly there as fans.

GR: It's been a little calculated – and not to reveal all our secrets – but if a lot more other brands saw the potential of that market, you'd see a lot more people doing it. It's hard for us to do business, because Mike and I go and we're just geeking out. Besides going out there to meet Tim and Eric [from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!], we're both really into Japanese kaiju and we had the chance to show off our own kaiju designs.

MB: Comic-Con 2008 was my first one. We wanted to see the Lost panel, but after we saw it spilling into the street, we just said "fuck it" and went to the Battlestar Galactica panel. That crowd was pretty big too, but Dean Koontz was still speaking. So yeah, we killed two hours listening to Dean Koontz.

Any good Mishka Comic-Con party tales?

GR: We crashed an Activision party at the Hard Rock Café and saw Stan Lee. If you're at a Comic-Con party and you see Stan Lee, you know you're at the coolest party.

MB: He was just hanging out with this girl on his arm.

GR: (laughs) She looked like she was twenty years old.

MB: I don't if she was, like, hitting on him or he was hitting on her, but Stan Lee's exactly how you picture him. He really says "true believer."

I wouldn't want him any other way. Do you find yourselves getting calls from influences who've enjoyed your work?

MB: Other than the artists who we're huge fans of and end up working with – like Derek Riggs and L'Amour Supreme – no, not really. A lot of our influences are grumpy old men.

What would you say is the most quintessential Mishka design?

GR: On our first trip to Japan, we stayed in this little town outside of Tokyo and found all these old Japanese horror and sci-fi press kits. These kits would take the coolest part of the movie and turn it into poster art. We found this great Westworld kit and Mike added some comic book stuff, like Ultron and Cyborg from Teen Titans to the design. To this day, it's still one of my favorite ones.

MB: We also found this Motel Hell kit in which we used for our "Electric Funeral" shirt. We electrified the faces and it turned out great.

Alright guys - some final lightning round questions. Kim Cattrall in Big Trouble in Little China or Kirstie Alley in Wrath of Khan?

MB: Kim Cattrall. I'm a Next Generation fan, what can I say.

Zardoz or Troll 2?

GR: Troll 2.

MB: Zardoz.

Would you rather have John Carpenter compose you a personal theme song or direct a movie about your life?

MB: I'd rather have him direct the movie because then he'd have to compose the film's theme song.

Shit! I hadn't thought of that loophole. Any final words to io9 readers?

GR: By all means check Mishka out - you'll definitely find something you like.

Mishka apparel is available at their website and their Brooklyn store at 350 Broadway in Williamsburg, NYC. Store photography courtesy of Dave Digioia.

The series, created by Studio Lindfors, imagines how New York and Tokyo would be transformed by rising sea levels, and how residents might adapt to life in their watery cities. While it shares common themes with post-apocalyptic images, it's not an entirely dismal view of the flooded future.

More images from the series are available at BLDGBLOG.

Times Square at Night
W. 29th Street & Broadway
Garment District
5th Avenue & 53rd Street
5th Avenue & 35th Street

There's not much information out there but so far The Fallout, not to be confused with the very layered video game Fallout, takes place in NY and is being described as a combination of Assault on Precinct 13 and Lord of The Flies — whatever the hell that means, I'm assuming an updated Escape From New York, but with shinier guns and kid gangs?

[Screen Daily]

New York

Los Angeles

Chicago

Washington, DC

San Francisco

Tokyo

London

Paris

Additional Reporting by Caitlin Petrakovitz.

What's your city got?

Additional reporting by Julia Carusillo.

My biggest beef with these shirts (aside from the giant crane in lieu of one of Tokyo's already gigantic movie monsters), is that more cities need to be represented. Where is the San Juan Chupacabra? The Vancouver Sasquatch? I'd even settle for a Montauk Monster.

T-shirts are available for $17 from Stussy.

[via Hide Your Arms]

Pastiche was created by software designer Ivan Safrin and visual artist Christian Marc Schmidt, who explain that it is much more than an animated version of concrete poetry:

Conceptually, Pastiche is a parallel experience of the city, a map that not only documents, but also suggests action. It is a public counterpart to the private physical architecture of the city. Its source an aggregate of individual blogs, Pastiche is a system that anyone has the ability to contribute to. It defines a new kind of public space, while both proposing an experience and inviting comparison-in the process of relating one's own perspective to a larger collective subjectivity, one situates oneself in relation to an impromptu community, formed around the idea of New York.

Mac users can download Pastiche and explore the city themselves here.

(Via)

The website explains,

Manhattan is an antique modern city, dark, decaying, malevolent and at the same time wonderful. The most recent screen versions of Batman have captured this dark feel perfectly. Here are our picks for the buildings and elements of Manhattan that make up the real Gotham city.

The photos offered up certainly capture the massive architecture of one of the spiritual ancestors of Batman's hometown, which was once described by Anton Furst - the production designer of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, whose Gotham City designs were later incorporated into the comic series in tribute following his death in 1991 - as "what might have happened to New York had there been no planning commission and had it been run by pure extortion and crime."

The Real Gotham City [Oobject]

If we had the time, we might torture you again with another caption contest... but more than one a week might be a bit too taxing on the funnybone. So, if you want to win, please just let us know in the comments below. Please note that you need to live in or extremely close to New York City to take advantage of these, so enter only if you really plan on using these tickets.

We'll be providing a list of the winners to the organizers of the event, and they'll have your name on a list and you'll be good to go. Please note that we'll select the first five comments from folks in the NYC area who want to see the movie. For the rest of you, set your Netflix for Tuesday, March 11th, and enjoy.

The 1970s were obsessed with large-scale disaster movies, offering audiences everything from Earthquake to Airport were all about massive mayhem and destruction with massive casts featuring top stars of the day, and Meteor stands as the bookend to that obsession. What's really impressive about the movie (besides the cast, which also included Natalie Wood, Karl Malden, Brian Keith, Martin Landau, Trevor Howard, Henry Fonda) was that it was based on an M.I.T. student science project called Project Icarus. If you've ever wondered how to stop a four-billion ton rock from hitting the Earth, then you might want to rent the movie, and pick up the book of the science project. Oh, and keep Sean Connery on your speed dial.

Apparently Elvis used to live in some kind of arcade. Here is Jeff's friend Eliza hanging out with uninjured Elvis. Jeff speculates:

I imagine there was either a messy breakup or a drunken kickboxing match, and Elvis-bot here took one right in the grill, then got dumped in the road. The thing is, covered in grime and with part of his face missing, it's MILLIONS of times cooler than it ever was brand-new. Sure, it took a little trauma and a lot of scarring, but that's what builds real character in humans and robots alike.

Flickr stream of the tragic robo-Elvis

What could be scarier than a bunch of new agey doctors giving you weird drugs while you're pregnant with Satan, or maybe an alien? Watch Mia Farrow try to cope with city life while pregnant with . . . something. It's all just typical New York stuff in Rosemary's Baby (1968), the ultimate urban mom horror-scifi monsterfest.

Speaking of scary babies, the man who brought you the ultimate evil baby movie It's Alive, Larry Cohen, made one of the great early-80s NY monster movies: Q the Winged Serpent (1982). Not only does it feature amazing stop-motion work on the monster — some sort of resurrected Aztec god — but you simply cannot beat a movie where a semi-naked lady sunbathing on her NY rooftop is snatched up and eaten by a winged lizard.
V, the Miniseries (1983) featured seemingly-nice aliens who came from a ship hovering over New York, but who would later rip off their human skins to reveal their hideous, reptile faces and evil natures. Though they claimed that they wanted to be friends with humans, it turned out they just wanted to eat us, turn us into soldiers, and use us as slaves. Much of the miniseries takes place in New York, though the human resistance to the aliens is located (improbably) in Los Angeles.

In response to rumors that alligators and other nasties were turning mutant in New York's sewers, a band of filmmaking geniuses brought you C.H.U.D., (1984) a tale about "cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers" who come out at night to eat New Yorkers. Now let's not get too picky about details, since if these creatures aren't human it's not exactly cannibalistic for them to eat people. One of the best B-movies of the 80s, if only due to the frantic efforts in movie ads to tie the flick into "current events."

And then, of course, there's the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man who almost destroyed New York in Ghostbusters (1984). Best giant monster ever.

In 1985, Greg Bear gave us the first nanotechnology "gray goo" scenario in his memorable novel Blood Music. In it, an experiment with nanotech goes horribly wrong after a Jekyll-ish scientist injects the nanites into his bloodstream and they become self-aware. After disassembling the scientist's body, they go on a global rampage, turning humans into the raw materials for their new cities. There's an amazing scene where a character looks out over New York City after its conversion to nanotech and says most of the city "looked like it was covered in brown and black blankets."

One of the best monsters ever to hit New York starred (not surprisingly) in a mostly-forgotten movie by Guillermo Del Toro (director of Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth) called Mimic (1997). In it, giant cockroaches (you can see one in the top image) from the NY sewers learn to emulate human form in order to camouflage themselves, hide in the subways, and EAT PEOPLE. Seriously great human-size monsters here. Mira Sorvino stars as the detective on their trail.

We try not to speak of Roland Emmerich's U.S. version of Godzilla (1998), but there it is. The movie was made; it had a really lame CGI version of Godzilla in it; New York was attacked. There, I admitted the movie exists. Now I will close my eyes and start chanting again.

And of course no list of NY monsters would be complete without at least a cursory nod to the Fantastic Four, since pretty much every Marvel hero lives in New York anyway. That's why Galactus attacked New York in the most recent Fantastic Four movie. Galactus is just a scary cloud in the movie, but looks more like a regular giant monster or maybe a giant robot in the comic books.

And the outlier: A giant chicken terrorizes Hoboken in Daniel Pinkwater's young-adult novel The Hoboken Chicken Emergency (1977). Later made into a movie, the novel is great stuff — goofy and smart — plus it's the only story we can think of about giant chickens set in New Jersey.

New Orange (1673). Those butter-fingered Dutch lost New York not once, but twice. The first time, the British came and seized the city of New Amsterdam by force in 1664, naming it New York after Charles II's brother the Duke of York. But then the Dutch took it back in the Third Dutch-English War of 1673 and renamed it "New Orange," after the Prince of Orange.
After that, the Dutch were living in a siege mentality and preparing to do whatever it took to keep the Big Orange in their grasp. But their politicians let them down, giving the city back to the Brits without a fight, in exchange for Suriname in South America. But what if the Dutch had hung on to it? It could have stayed Dutch long after 1776, and Americans would be making pilgrimages to the cannibis cafes of New Orange.

The Great Fire of New York (1835). This terrible conflagration started near Pearl St., and quickly spread to Exchange Place, the NYSE and Wall Street. It burned for between 16 and 24 hours, destroying 674 buildings across 17 blocks and 50 acres. Fire fighters had a hard time getting water because the Hudson was frozen solid. Metal from shutters and roofs melted and ran down the streets.
But it could have been much, much worse. The Great Fire of London, just 169 years earlier, burned for four days, not one. The New York Conflagration reached the top of the Tontine Hall, too high for the cold-numbed firefighters' hoses to reach. The last-ditch plan of using a huge "gin puncheon" (cask) to get water onto the roof tiles saved the upper part of the city. How would New York look now if the fire had destroyed mid-town Manhattan? Hint: the actual street where the fire started, Merchant St., doesn't exist any more, since that part of the city was rebuilt with a new layout.

The Blasting of Flood Rock (1885). In the nineteenth century, a section of the East River from 90th street to around 100th street, near the Harlem River was known as "Hell Gate" because it was so difficult for sea-faring vessels to navigate. It had a giant whirlpool (because of currents from Long Island Sound) and huge jagged rocks. A thousand ships ran aground every year. The Harbor Master of New York begged the federal government for help. So the U.S. Army destroyed the biggest rock, Flood Rock, by detonating 285,000 pounds of an explosive mixture called "Rack-A-Rock," plus 5,000 pounds of dynamite. It may have been the largest civil detonation up to that point. Here's a photo which 12-year-old Mary Newton took:
What if the Army had turned down the gig, or been unable to pull it off? Private efforts had already blasted some of the smaller rocks in Hell Gate. But without the destruction of Flood Rock, New York would have been unable to reach its full potential as a port city. Just 40 years after this blast, New York overtook London as the largest city in the world.

LOMEX (1941). Robert Moses, aka "Bob The Builder," had a plan to knock down a huge stretch of Lower Manhattan, including SOHO, and build a massive freeway across the city. It would have connected the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges. At one point, in 1946, Moses proposed a six-lane elevated expressway in the vicinity of Canal St. Just imagine the huge overpasses. Plans continued into the 1950s. Here's an artist's conception of what SOHO would have looked like:
A huge grass-roots movement opposed the development, led by Jane Jacobs, author of The Life and Death of Great American Cities. But in the end, it was skyrocketing budget estimates for the project, plus the failure of downtown Manhattan office buildings to generate the expected traffic, that scuttled the project. (As recently as 1998, planners were discussing reviving the project on the Usenet group misc.transport.roads.) If the city and federal bureaucracy hadn't delayed LOMEX for so long, SOHO wouldn't exist today.

Neu York (1946). Finally, here's an "alternate history map" that shows what NYC would look like if the Nazis had won World War II. Melissa Gould painstakingly reshaped "Neu York," giving streets German names (Rhein instead of Canal) and eliminating post-war buildings and anything with a Jewish name. (Via Claire Light.)
Blade Runner concept art by Syd Mead.

Sanders, author of Celluloid Skyline, says "everybody" thought there would be no more images of New York's destruction after Sept. 11. But the New York skyline makes too tempting a target for film-makers. NYC provides a "yardstick" for the scale of destruction, and is meaningful to overseas audiences in a way that Chicago or St. Louis just aren't.

Then we get to the crack-smoking portion of Sanders' quotes in the Times article:

In contrast to I Am Legend — which like The Omega Man (1971) is based on a Richard Matheson novel — the Cloverfield images verge on being tasteless, Mr. Sanders said. "They are playing on feelings not just about New York as civic symbol but on the shock of Sept. 11," he said. "To some degree, that's not fair ball."

I'm not sure which part of his statement is weirder. The idea that there's a "tasteful" way to show millions of people dying, or the idea that audiences can't tell the difference between real destruction and movie spectacle. Actually, I know: it's the notion that I Am Legend wasn't pure 9/11 porn, which it was. (How many times does Will Smith use the phrase "Ground Zero" in that movie again?)

Still, I'm beginning to understand why director Francis Lawrence decided to make I Am Legend look less post-apocalyptic and more nature-park. If you actually cut loose in your fantasy movie and show real destruction and havoc, then people will accuse you of being an impolite bounder, not fit for good society.

Luckily, the problem will solve itself. America won't be the world's main superpower much longer, and NYC won't be the world's leading city. Soon, people will be much more interested in seeing Shanghai or Seoul destroyed than NYC anyway.

[New York Times]