Christian Fletcher’s Skull

Christian Fletcher is surfing’s first original punk. As Charlie Smith once wrote for this very magazine, Christian was into long hair, day-glo wetsuits, full-deck grip and death metal in 1981. And by 1988 Christian was riding stubby boards and doing airs. He’s at the forefront of a “new” movement (see below). The fluorescent logo you see above, designed for Christian’s board company, is pure Fletcher – a stoked-out skeleton with long, lime hair, winking in front of a hyper-coloured sunset and barreling peak. A New Zealand apparel label, called Lower, dug the image, too – so much so, that they ran a line of long-sleeve shirts with the logo printed over the chest. Whether it was tongue-in-cheek or a genuine foray into radicalness is unclear, but what’s certain is that Christian didn’t sign off on the usage and didn’t in fact know anything about it. ‘Till he found it on the Internets and got a nasty little shock. The shirt’s even called “The Fletch”. Credit where credit’s due, or an homage taken in the wrong way?