In this edition of counterfeits we have a fake Brand-X deck. The original team deck from 1987 was designed by silkscreen-artist Bernie Tostenson. In the late seventies and early eighties Bernie was working for Sims where he created the famous ‘Winged logo’ and Brad Bowman’s ‘Superman logo’. In 1984 he and Bud (a photographer and salesman) started Brand-X. They ran the underground company for about 5 years illegally  from Bernie’s garage, where Bernie did all those crazy silkscreens. He said these were the happiest years of his life and they had fun, while the big companies destroyed the soul of skateboarding. In 1988 Brand-X made a partnership with one of their distributors and did well for about one year, but the story goes that the new partner stole the Brand-X name, fired the whole crew and amateur team, hired cheap artists and screeners and let the company die in only a few months. Bernie still designed for Flip in the nineties. He died in 2009. For sale at 2dehands.be. [Sources: Disposable 1 and 2 by Sean Cliver]

  This quick sketch from Blockhead artist Ron Cameron shows the best way to shoot a board at home. Ron is working on a book and sent me this so I could photograph a super nice and rare Blockhead deck I found  in an old toy store in Belgium last year. The method works just fine and is tested and approved by Sean Cliver himself.

This crazy thing doesn’t need much explanation. It’s a bootleg of a Powell Peralta Mike Mcgill ‘Skull and Snake’ with snakeskin background from 1986 or 1987 and  it even has wheel wells, where the original one (seen on right) doesn’t. The original artist is of course VCJ and I guess you could say that the counterfeiter made a pretty nice ‘interpretation’ of VCJ’s work, although the ‘skating fox with slippers’ on the topside has nothing to do with the ripper or any of the Powell graphics. For sale on Ebay. Thanks to Sara Raso for the pics.

In this edition of Bootleg Boards we have a Denny Riordon bootleg. Kryptonics used this graphic in 1988 for Denny’s first street deck. Later that year, after Kryptonics reincarnated into Toxic, they released a seemingly identical shaped Rordion deck with a slightly different ‘people in my head’ design. In 1990 the head popped up a third time on a Toxic Riordon freestyle deck. Maybe whoever copied that deck thought it was a very popular design, although the ripoff we have here was clearly based on the first version of the graphic. Even the skull with the dagger on the top side reminds me of the Ripstik and mid to late eighties Kryptonics decks or maybe it’s because their boards looked kinda cheap as well. Sold on Ebay for $15 on a Buy It Now.

Not much to say about this one. You either love it or hate it. Maybe about 20 years too late though. Still funny though. Get yours at Mustache Empire.

This month’s counterfeit is a Street Warrior with a top side that bears a strong resemblance to a Per Welinder, courtesy of a French auction site. The bottom side looks like a knock off of a sideways glance at a Nash board, or a 7-Up advert. – Thanks to David Maes for the tip.

Shove it is a crazy huge art show crossover with skateboards, artists and paper toy designers. It would seem like an odd thing, but MC made a paper toy version of GVK a few years ago. This is a Kickstarter project, and they need the money to produce limited releases of the skateboards I guess. It’s also supposed to be a public relations effort for a new skatepark in Des Moines, but they are super, super vague about that in the video, which is, in any case, pretty interesting for the Kickstarter genre.

On this edition of counterfeit skateboards we have a completely generic looking Gator rip off found all the way over in Belgium, complete with a Tony Hawk Skategear sticker that definitely looks like it’s an 80’s vintage, but I’m wondering if it (sticker) is of a later vintage, because it doesn’t look familiar to me. – Thanks to David Maes for the tip.