Strange by Design: Ninth Planet's New Alternative Range Arrives This October
Strange by Design: Ninth Planet's New Alternative Range Arrives This October
For years, Ninth Planet T-Shirts has been built around the things we love. Movies that refuse to stay dead. TV shows we can quote decades later. Cartoons, cult classics, horror icons and all those fragments of pop culture that somehow ended up becoming part of who we are.
Yet some of the best T-shirts don't need a famous name, a movie title or a recognisable franchise to make an impression. Sometimes it's the artwork itself that catches your attention. Something unusual, wonderfully strange or so brilliantly conceived that you find yourself wanting to wear it simply because it looks so damn good.
We've always had a soft spot for that kind of creativity, and we've decided it's time to give it a home of its own. So, this October, Ninth Planet is getting a little stranger…
Welcome to the Alternative
On 20th October, Alternative will become an entirely new section of Ninth Planet T-Shirts, sitting alongside our existing Movies & TV, Bands and Kids ranges.
The idea behind it is pretty simple: Alternative will be our home for the unusual stuff, artist-led designs, underground imagery, retro weirdness, horror, gothic artwork, dark humour and anything else that feels at home in the Ninth Planet universe without necessarily belonging to an established franchise.
There doesn't have to be a film attached to it or an album that inspired it. Sometimes a great T-shirt is reason enough, and we want to create a place where artwork can be celebrated entirely on its own merits.
And if we're going to open the doors to this strange new corner of Ninth Planet, we couldn't think of anyone better to introduce it.
His name is Steven Rhodes, and there's a fairly good chance you've already seen his work.
Meet Steven Rhodes
Smiling children gather around a pentagram. A wholesome-looking youngster discovers the joys of pyrokinesis. Somewhere, somebody's demon cat needs looking after… At first glance, Steven Rhodes' artwork could have been rescued from the children's section of a particularly questionable 1970s charity shop. Look a little closer and things have usually gone horribly, hilariously wrong.
Rhodes is an Australian graphic artist and illustrator based in Brisbane, best known for his Sinister Seventies collection and its wonderfully warped reimagining of children's activity books from the 1970s and '80s. Designs including Let's Summon Demons and Pyrokinesis for Beginners have travelled far beyond their origins, with his work appearing through retailers including Spencer's and Hot Topic, alongside collaborations with Threadless, Killstar, Creepy Co. and Cavity Colours.
The style is instantly recognisable now, but it wasn't something Rhodes developed overnight. In fact, it took him quite a while to find it.
Before the Demons Came Calling
Rhodes has been drawing and painting for as long as he can remember, although the distinctive style we now associate with his name emerged much later. He spent years submitting work to Threadless, experimenting with digital illustration and different visual approaches before arriving at something that felt distinctly his own. Then, in 2016, he created a design called Science!
It looked reassuringly familiar, like the sort of bright educational illustration you might remember from an old school textbook, except for the rather inconvenient mushroom cloud rising in the background. Rhodes has since described Science! as the first piece created in what would become his familiar Sinister Seventies style.
The real breakthrough came with Let's Summon Demons, a beautifully simple collision of wholesome childhood imagery and thoroughly questionable subject matter. By borrowing the visual language of a vintage children's activity book and filling it with innocent-looking youngsters enthusiastically dabbling in satanic ritual, Rhodes had found a concept that audiences immediately responded to.
He later credited the design with getting the series moving and opening doors for him. Its popularity encouraged him to keep exploring the idea, gradually transforming what had begun as a creative experiment into the work for which he would become internationally recognised.
Luckily, there were plenty more traumatised little Timmys where that came from.
"My style grew out of a real obsession with vintage design."
That fascination is central to understanding why Steven Rhodes' artwork feels so convincing. He isn't simply drawing something strange and throwing a sepia filter over it. The aesthetic comes from a genuine affection for the visual culture of previous decades, particularly the imagery that surrounded his childhood.
Growing up in the 1980s, Rhodes was immersed in cartoons and science fiction, with favourites including Masters of the Universe, Transformers, Voltron and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, alongside an enduring obsession with the original Star Wars trilogy.
He remembers a time when what you watched depended largely on what happened to be on television or what you could bring home from the local video shop. Films were recorded onto VHS, favourite tapes were watched repeatedly, and the artwork decorating those plastic cases could be almost as memorable as the films themselves.
His influences extend far beyond television and cinema. Old books, board games, trading cards, arcade graphics, advertisements and toy packaging all contribute to the distinctive visual vocabulary that runs through his illustrations.
Then there is the darker side of his imagination. Retro horror, witchcraft, devil imagery and the gloriously excessive practical effects of 1980s horror cinema have all played their part. Rhodes has specifically cited films including Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Thing among the influences feeding into his creative world.
Even the 1970s themselves hold a particular fascination for him. Although Rhodes once joked that he was alive for only around two months of the decade, he has spoken enthusiastically about its record sleeves, movie posters, band shirts, advertising, fashion, custom vans, shag carpets and doorway beads.
This isn't somebody borrowing nostalgia because it happens to be fashionable. His work is rooted in a genuine affection for the era, and that enthusiasm is evident in almost every detail of his work.
The Art of Making Something Look Wrong
The clever thing about Steven Rhodes' illustrations is that the joke only really works when everything surrounding it looks completely authentic.
The typography, colours, composition and slightly faded warmth of the artwork all need to convince your brain that you're looking at something innocent from another time. The more convincing that illusion becomes, the funnier it is when you realise the smiling children are enthusiastically summoning Satan.
Rhodes has described his approach as taking familiar imagery from decades gone by and finding ways to breathe strange new life into it while remaining faithful to the original era. His process can involve thumbnail sketches to establish a composition, followed by research into appropriate reference imagery, typefaces and colour palettes. The artwork is then sketched and inked, scanned and finally coloured digitally.
That attention to detail is what allows the designs to work beyond their initial punchlines. They're not simply funny slogans printed onto black T-shirts, but carefully constructed illustrations that could almost pass for genuine artefacts from the decades they're parodying.
And beneath all the pentagrams, demons, knives and traumatised children sits something surprisingly simple: nostalgia.
Childhood Memories, Slightly Corrupted
Rhodes once explained that growing up in the 1980s meant this particular visual aesthetic was simply ingrained in him. Combining that sense of childhood innocence with horror and occult imagery offered seemingly endless possibilities, allowing him to revisit familiar memories and twist them into something wonderfully inappropriate.
If you grew up around old Ladybird-style illustrations, mail-order catalogues, battered VHS cases, lurid horror artwork and children's books filled with smiling families doing wholesome things, there's an immediate familiarity to his work. Your brain recognises the visual language before it has properly processed what the illustration is actually depicting.
And then you discover that the wholesome activity being advertised is something like Let's Sacrifice Toby.
There is a genuine balancing act involved in making that kind of humour work. As the series expanded, Rhodes spoke about constantly trying to find the line between being dark and being funny without wandering too far into bad taste.
It's probably why his best designs feel mischievous rather than genuinely nasty. The children might be learning necromancy, but they seem to be having a lovely afternoon.
From T-Shirts to the Occult Book Club
Eventually, the fictional world Rhodes had created became too entertaining to remain confined to clothing.
In 2020, he released My Little Occult Book Club: A Creepy Collection, an 80-page hardback that took the original concept and expanded it into something resembling an entire catalogue of deeply unsuitable childhood reading material.
Presented in the style of an old children's subscription-book catalogue, it features such wholesome educational offerings as Necromancy for Beginners, Sell Your Soul!, Caring for Your Demon Cat and, naturally, Let's Summon Demons. There are puzzles, activities and even suitably terrible fake mail-order offers, all presented with the cheerful enthusiasm of a publisher apparently unaware that anything might be wrong.
By this point, what had started as an amusing collision between two visual worlds had effectively become a world of its own. Rhodes had developed a recognisable artistic identity built around a particular kind of nostalgia, one that was affectionate enough to feel familiar and mischievous enough to remain entertaining.
And that brings us back to Ninth Planet.
Why Steven Rhodes?
When we started thinking seriously about what Alternative should become, one thing was immediately clear. We didn't want it to turn into the miscellaneous section, the digital equivalent of a box at the back of a shop containing everything that didn't quite fit anywhere else.
We wanted Alternative to have a personality of its own. Somewhere people would deliberately visit because they were looking for something different, whether that meant gothic artwork, dark humour, retro illustration, fantasy, horror or simply a design that caught their imagination.
Steven Rhodes seemed almost ridiculously well suited to introducing that idea.
Although his artwork isn't tied to the films, television programmes and bands already represented throughout Ninth Planet, it comes from much of the same cultural DNA. Video shops, horror movies, cartoons, toys, old advertising and retro graphics are all part of the visual world that shaped both his work and the things we've always loved celebrating.
What Rhodes does so brilliantly is take the feeling of those influences and transform it into something original. His designs are immediately familiar without needing to reference a particular franchise, and they demonstrate exactly why great artwork deserves a place in its own right.
That's the sort of creativity we want Alternative to explore, and it's why we couldn't imagine a more fitting artist to lead the way.
Up to Ten New Designs Are Coming This October
On the 20th October Ninth Planet T-Shirts will officially launch its new Alternative range, spearheaded by a collection of up to ten Steven Rhodes designs.
And yes, the timing was entirely deliberate!
If we're going to introduce a collection filled with demons, occult activity books, supernatural mishaps and children who desperately need better adult supervision, the run-up to Halloween seems like a particularly appropriate moment to do it.
We'll be revealing more of the designs as launch day approaches, giving you a closer look at the artwork and the wonderfully strange characters that make Rhodes' creations so distinctive.
But while Steven Rhodes is our featured launch artist, Alternative isn't intended to become a collection devoted exclusively to his work. The range will continue to grow, introducing other artists, styles and designs over time, that share the same spirit of individuality, imagination and creative freedom.
This is just the start of what we have in store.
This Is Only the Beginning…
Alternative gives us the freedom to look beyond the worlds of licensed entertainment and music, bringing in artists, collections and designs simply because we love the artwork and think other people will too.
Some will be dark, others funny. There will be gothic illustrations, horror-inspired imagery, retro oddities, fantasy artwork, strange characters and designs that are simply too difficult to categorise. Not everything will share the same aesthetic, and that's part of the appeal. We want Alternative to be somewhere you can discover something unexpected, perhaps even something you didn't even know you wanted until you saw it.
And that's really the point. Alternative isn't about replacing what Ninth Planet already does; it's about creating another corner of it, one where great artwork doesn't need a famous film, television series, band or franchise attached to it to earn its place on a T-shirt. If something catches our eye, feels at home here and makes us think we'd wear the hell out of that, this is where we want it to live.
Steven Rhodes is opening the door… and we're waiting to see what else wanders through it.
Alternative launches at Ninth Planet T-Shirts on 20 October, just in time for Halloween. Things are about to get weird.
