SCUL Calendars: Time capsules of a Bicycle Chopper Gang

Like plasma through the thrusters, so are the seasons of a SCUL pilot

I’ve been designing and producing SCUL calendars annually since 1998, the first of which was inspired from a calendar I saw when I worked as a finisher at Merlin Metalworks in Cambridge, MA. This inspiring tapestry was a promotional calendar produced by President Titanium, which featured glorious images of a single fighter jets in the air, some of which may have even been firing missiles. Each month included some tech specs for captions: something along the lines of ‘The Bobcat-F19 sports a four-by-four por-favor with an output of 6.1 floozeljets, and is capable of trans-sonic loop the loops’. At least it may have well read that—it was gobbledygook to a newly-recruited Herrell’s ice cream-slinger such as myself. At the time SCUL had more ships than pilots, so the plane motif was a perfect fit.

The 1999 calendar was inspired by the television show Space 1999, which for some reason in my distant memory had a baseline motif of rounded rectangles.

The year 2000 was a year I felt compelled to break the mold, and in doing so broke the full-color barrier. At the time it seemed like the right thing to do, but it wound up costing a fortune; luckily Flasher was kind enough to talk Kinko’s down after they had totally botched the proofs, which helped with damage control. The 2000 SCUL Calendar is also the earliest appearance of a typeface I created exclusively for SCUL: “Skunk Display Caps”, inspired from the first hand-drawn SCUL logotype: something fast and hard, and slightly illegible due to it being from the future. At least that was my reasoning at the time.

In 2010 SCUL acquired wire-o technology we could go as large as two tabloid-sized sheets, which brings us up to 11×34″ or 22×17″. However SCUL pilot photography comes in both portrait as well as landscape format need to be represented. The square format provides the most amount of possibilities for ensuring important images. Most photographers would rather crop to fit the image (as would I). In the case of the calendar format, square ratio allows for the most amount of image inclusion. If SCUL was a chopper-exclusive or HARV-exclusive gang; the calendar photo would be rectangular.

Criteria

• Does the image have a ship or significant icon of SCUL in it?
• Is the image detailed or intriguing enough to look at for a month?
• Do the images represent a window into SCULture?

This calendar would not exist without Seven Cycles for assistance with printing, cutting, and assembly.