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The idea was to paint hideous monsters on children’s T-shirts – and make a fortune selling them. And so from the endish mind of American cartoonist Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth came a comically grotesque, depravedlooking rodent-like caricature, with bulging, bloodshot eyes and long, sharp teeth. The creature wore red overalls bearing the trademark initials, RF. ‘Rat Fink’ was conceived by Roth as a sort-of anti-hero to Mickey Mouse, and while it mightn’t have played well with the Disney audience (or as a lucrative line in children’s t-shirts, as the artist had originally planned), before long Roth’s mischievous-looking rat was all the rage in the Southern Californian drag racing and custom car scenes. By then (early in the ‘60s) Roth already knew he was onto something with his peculiar brand of art, nding a ready market for ‘weirdo’ T-shirts bearing his bizarre designs, with his crazed creatures appearing in Hot Rod magazines as early as the late ‘50s. Soon the ‘weirdo’ t-shirt thing became a craze, and then an industry, with Roth’s Rat Fink as unofficial mascot. The rest, as they say, is history. Rat Fink might be mainly a phenomenon of the ‘60s and early ‘70s (the black-and-white ad shown here is from a 1970 issue of Australian Hot Rod mag), but the green rat never really went away (you can still buy all manner of new Rat Fink t-shirts and associated merch today). In the ‘80s and ’90s Rat Fink enjoyed something of a revival as the character became associated with the grunge rock scene (Roth designed the cover art for Australian indie band The Birthday Party’s 1982 album, Junk Yard). Then in the ‘90s the rat went mainstream commercial, with automotive additive manufacturer Berryman Products getting together with Roth to create a Rat Finkstyle mascot/company logo – the ‘Chem Tooler,’ with the aim, Berryman’s website says, of ‘bringing a fun and edgy way to interact with the end user.’