- I've been drawing my entire life.

I prefer to say I'm a cartoonist.

That's kind of where my heart is.

I love like, you know, the old '40s, like Walt Kelly, Pogo Comics.

There's a tendency to have nostalgia more for times that you didn't live in than the ones that you did.

(gentle quirky music) I collect a lot of toys, specifically like vintage monster toys.

Frankenstein and Dracula, that kind of thing.

We as kids took the "collect them all" on the back of the, you know, action figure package as a like, dogma.

There was a period of time, about like 1964, where they started marketing classic horror movies in a way that they never had before, so you had model kits and toys and clothes and all this stuff.

I've always really been fascinated with that time period.

Also kind of overlapped with the peak of like, tiki culture.

I design tiki mugs.

I always wanted to make characters, I always wanted to write stories.

(gentle quirky music) I like to make each mug a character.

I'm always looking for some other outlet to keep it fun.

(gentle serene music) (gentle serene music continues) (gentle serene music continues) The Black Lagoon Room is, the bar in our basement is what it's named after.

I was working in the music industry for years in Chicago.

We moved up here 10 years ago, and I really just still kind of wanted a creative outlet.

I'd done a lot of illustration and, you know, concert posters, I did album art, I did all kinds of stuff when I was in the industry.

I thought it'd be fun to start making some stuff, so we made some glasses for the home bar.

That kind of morphed into shirts and enamel pins and patches, and now our primary focus is tiki mugs.

(cheerful music) We had a moment a few years ago where we kind of decided we would like to open our own tiki bar.

We were kind of seriously looking at spaces around 2019, and we knew a couple of people who, for their businesses, had designed tiki mugs.

We just decided to try a design.

The week that our first mug was delivered was the week that everything shut down for COVID, so (laughs) we didn't do that.

Our first mug was the Creature from the Crab Rangoon, which is like a little monster coming out of a Chinese takeout box.

Our second was our Thirsty Creature, which was, it's a monster hand coming out of water, holding a tiki mug.

We did another one called Trick or Tiki that was a little pumpkin pail with a tiki face on it, and it had the text on the back.

Our most recent mug, Mai Tai'd Til I Died, is a little tombstone.

I don't like to release anything that doesn't have a fun name.

(chuckles) There's a surprising amount of tiki events around the country.

We do Tiki Oasis in San Diego, which is the biggest tiki event in the world.

We're in Ohio for Mai Tai Mayhem.

I mean, I couldn't do it without the support of people.

There's people that will wait in line to get into the event to come to our table to buy one specific thing.

I mean, we had a lady show up at a show in Chicago a few years ago, who drove from Kansas City to Chicago just to get this one thing that we only had there.

Just knowing that it resonates with people like that.

I mean, I get messages all the time from people that are like, "Oh my God, this is, you know, the coolest thing, and I love it," and, you know, or, "Half my collection is your stuff," or, you know, that kind of thing is just, it's so amazing.

- [Announcer] Thanks for watching The Arts Page.

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