One Sheet: Asphalt Animal, Roach, 1968
Posted by Jon on
One Sheet is a series about single objects from the boxes.
Where the company started
Roach Studios was founded in 1962 in Columbus, Ohio, by brothers Russ and Dennis Roush. They sold t-shirts to car and hot rod enthusiasts, advertising in the motoring magazines. Iron-on transfers came in 1966, when a third partner joined — because a transfer meant you could make a shirt to order instead of carrying stock.
By 1978 the company was doing $20 million a year.
This sheet is from the beginning of that. Dated 1968, and it isn’t a licence or a brand — it’s an attitude, sold to riders. Asphalt Animal.
Why the early ones look different
Put it beside a 1979 sheet and the change is obvious. This is flat, direct, few colours, no glitter. By the late seventies you get photographic reproduction, metallic flake, six-colour separations.
The technique dates the object almost as reliably as the printed year does.
What we worked out from it
Before we found any outside account of Roach, we could already tell from the boxes that they had started with machinery — a Triumph and this sheet in 1968, a BSA in 1969, Kawasaki by 1970, Olds and Chevrolets throughout.
The published history later confirmed it: hot rods first, everything else afterwards.
That’s the argument for treating merchandise as evidence. We read a company’s origins off its own product, correctly, before we read them anywhere else.
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