All Over: The 1986 Wild Oats Frazetta Death Dealer Tee

A black t-shirt with a painting printed over all of it, front, back, and sleeves. Wild Oats tag, XL, made in USA, 1986 on the print. The painting is Frank Frazetta's Death Dealer. The shirt is $400, which is the most this blog has ever put next to a shirt, so this post is going to earn that number or say plainly where it does not.

The painting first

Frank Frazetta, 1928 to 2010, Brooklyn. Comics in the 40s and 50s, then the paperback covers that made him: the Lancer Conan books from 1966 on, Tarzan, John Carter, the Edgar Rice Burroughs reprints. If you have a picture in your head of what a barbarian looks like, he put it there. He painted fast, in oils, and he painted figures the way a sculptor would, weight first.

Death Dealer is from 1973. A rider in black armor, horned helmet, axe, shield, on a dark horse, eyes glowing from a face you never see. He painted several more over the years with the same figure, so Death Dealer is a series, and the 1973 one is the one everybody means. Molly Hatchet put it on their debut album in 1978 and that is how most people met it. The US Army's III Corps took it as a mascot in 1985 and there is a life-size metal statue of it at Fort Hood since 2009. There were novels from 1988, comics from 1995, a Dark Horse statue in 2003, an Image series in 2007. Magic cards in 2022. The painting outlived the painter and is still working.

Point being: this is not a band shirt or a movie shirt. It is a shirt of a painting, licensed from the painter while he was alive. That is a different category of object.

What Wild Oats was

Wild Oats was a US printer that did licensed all over print tees from the late 80s through the 90s: Looney Tunes, Taz, band shirts, and the Frazetta designs. The Frazetta ones are the ones collectors chase, because the paintings were made for exactly this. Frazetta composed in full bleed. An all over print is the only format that does not crop him.

Reading an all over print is a skill, so here is the method. An all over print is printed on the fabric before the shirt is sewn, which is why the image runs across the side seams and into the sleeves without a break. Hold the shirt open at the seam. If the print lines up across it, the panels were cut from the same printed bolt. If it stops at the seam, it is a front print on a finished blank, which is a cheaper object. The tag is the second check: Wild Oats tags are their own thing, and the blank, the stitching, and the fade should all agree with the tag's era. A 1986 date on the print is the art copyright or the license date, not necessarily the day the shirt was made, and on a licensed Frazetta that is the honest way to read it: late 80s, made in USA, this license. Ten photos in the listing. Find the seams in them.

This one

Black, printed edge to edge, Wild Oats tag, XL, made in USA, 22 inches pit to pit, 28.5 long. Used. Judge the fade and the cracking from the photos, because every one of these has some, and the ones that have none are the ones to worry about. (Forty years of wear on a shirt whose whole point is the print. The wear is the proof.)

What it goes for

Honest numbers, and this is where the post gets careful. Death Dealer tees in general are not rare: front prints from the 80s and 90s are on eBay and Grailed right now at $80 for a Wild Oats front print in XL, $148 sold for a distressed vintage L, $200 asked for a 1987 shirt at a vintage shop. Those are front prints. The all over print is a different tier and a different object, and I could not find a clean sold comp for a Wild Oats Death Dealer all over print in the last few months. Which means $400 is a position, not a quote. The position is: full-bleed Frazetta on the printer that did it right, in XL, with the wear that proves it, in California, photographed. If you can find the same shirt cheaper, buy that one. I looked and did not.

The shirt is here. Look at the seams.