The first thing the eye registers is not the cat. It is the word GREETINGS, arched in blue-purple dimensional letters across the top of the print, and the word HUZZ below it, the same lettering, the same false volume. Between them sits an orange tabby in a backwards red cap,…

The Scene That Isn’t There In the first episode of Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil (Sheytan vojud nadarad, 2020), a man named Heshmat spends his day doing what ordinary men do. He helps neighbors retrieve a cat. He collects his wife and daughter. He takes them to visit his…

The orange face is a jack-o’-lantern, and the visual observation is simple: an orange jack-o’-lantern face graphic with vampire fangs in its mouth. No text, no caption, no explanatory label. The joke is entirely visual, and it depends on a collision of two familiar Halloween icons that normally stay separate.…

An orange jack-o’-lantern face, printed flat on a shirt: two round eyes, a heart-shaped nose, a smiling mouth. That is the whole design. No caption, no date, no artist’s signature. The retail title calls it a “Cute Kids Jack O Lantern Face Halloween Costume Pumpkin,” but the words are packaging;…

The first thing the shirt does is put the words in a ring. LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW runs around the outside of the printed area, and inside that ring sit four smiling root vegetables — a carrot, a radish, a beet, and an onion…

The first thing the eye finds is not the ghost. It is the word. A white ruled rectangle sits high on the chest, headed COMPOSITION in a plain sans-serif, and only beneath that header do the two line drawings appear: an outlined ghost, a pumpkin, both rendered in the same…

The graphic is orange, and it is a face. A jack-o’-lantern face, carved, with one eye closed in a wink and a tongue sticking out. The mouth is a wide, jagged grin, the kind that suggests a pumpkin was cut with a knife and a sense of humor. The tongue…

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The graphic is orange, and it is a face. Two triangular eyes, a triangular nose, a mouth cut as a smile with at least one tooth left standing. The eyelashes sit above the eyes — short, deliberate strokes that…

TWEEDLE DUM sits at the top of the chest. Below it, in the same distressed lettering, I’M WITH DEE. To the right of the text, an arrow points off the garment entirely — toward whoever is standing beside the wearer. That is the whole design. Two lines of type, one…

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The shirt prints two words above a picture, and the picture contradicts the words. I GOT THAT DOG sits on the upper chest in cream lettering; IN ME sits below it. Between the two lines, a small tan cartoon…