JSRF Gets Larger Than Life

The world of Jet Set Radio merchandise is a small one. Even the most avid collector could only fill a single shelf with what Sega has to offer. Thankfully a company thought outside the shelf by applying the JSRF license to large-format repositionable wall graphics!


LTL Prints, the company responsible, was founded in late 2008 by by entrepreneurs Kendall Schoenrock and Carsten Petzold. Taken from their own "about" page: "We set out to create a platform for creative expression that would bring larger-than-life repositionable wall graphics to empty walls everywhere," according to LTLprints founder Kendall Schoenrock. "And we are working with the worlds' premier artists, designers, and brands to literally CREATE a new medium."


VP of Marketing John Doffing was nice enough to get me in touch with Kendall and Carsten, and I was surprised to find out that both LTL Prints and myself are located within in the same city (Philadelphia)! What more, I was a short ten minute subway ride from their HQ! So taking an extended lunch break, I headed on over to LTL Prints. Once there, I was greeted by Kendall and Carsten and was able to have a look about. The printer they use is enormous, think "the grand piano of printers", while the walls of their office was covered in a variety of images available on their online catalog.

An example from the LTL catalog, laptop sizes go for $14.99

Carsten revealed to me that JSRF was VP of Marketing John Doffling's idea. “we did JSRF as the first video game license for one simple reason: cel-shaded characters look AMAZING as big wall graphics and I personally LOVED this game! I approached SEGA directly to make it happen, and we just launched!" said an enthusiastic Doffling, "I personally am a huge fan and proponent of VIDEO GAME ART, and this new medium is a perfect way to bring this artwork to consumers globally."

Before I left LTL, I asked what other Sega licenses they were considering. Carsten turned the question around and asked what I'd like to see. Of course, any Sega image would look awesome on a wall (with the exception of maybe Silver the Hedgehog), but I limited my requests to Virtua Fighter, Outrun, Space Harrier, HangOn, After Burner, Panzer Dragoon (Saga and Orta), classic Japanese Sonic art and the original Jet Set Radio (which LTL actually has some images of, though they aren't seen in the catalog... yet).

Before leaving, LTL was nice enough to let me choose a JSRF image from their catalog to place on my wall and to share with all of you! Of course, I chose my favorite character Bis (aka Bisu aka Rhyth aka Mew) holding an iconic yellow spray can. Take a look at my hanging process below:

Note that LTL's prints are fabric, not vinyl, so there is no fear of ripping. The adhesive will not damage walls or stick to skin or any other surface in the way that a usual sticker would.



Upon applying Bisu, I discovered that she was crooked and that her arm was going behind the shelf. Thankfully, LTL promises that their prints can be moved 100 times without losing adhesion. So after a few removals and readhesions, Bisu was in place!

Special thanks to LTL Prints. Head on over to look at their extensive JSRF catalog. Even the electric police fences got their own page!

Robotnik Painting by Milton Knight

(Copy and paste from my personal blog, because it's relevant here too)

Well lookie here what showed up in the post today! A painting of Dr.Robotnik by Milton Knight that I purchased from him just last week! I bought a frame for it and it's currently sitting proud above my computer. He had three different pieces of art for sale on his website although I'm not sure if the other two are still available. Either way it's my first piece of original artwork by a professional animator (one who I've talked about on here many times before, mainly for his work on the 90's Sonic cartoon) so I'm happy. Oh yeah, and i contributed a little bit to his Robotnik Toy Chest page. :)

Here's a clip of the man sketching out a quick Robotnik for an extra on the American Sonic DVD. Look how expressive his drawing is in such a quick sketch!

Sega Art Book of Sheer Beauty Part 3: Wallpapers!

The same images you just saw the scans of, but now as wallpapers. They are all 1280 X 1024, so if they're too big just shrink and if they're too small, sorry! I could maybe make bigger sized versions of some of them if anyone wants them, but for now these will do.

More wallpapers after the jump!


 Bonus! I made this Pirate TV wallpaper ages ago and never got around to uploading it so here you go. This one is actually at 1600 X 1200 so I have no excuse for the above ones being smaller. Oh well.

Japanese Sega Art Book of Sheer Beauty Part 2: Scans!

As I promised here are some full scale scans from that wonderful Sega game illustrations book.

Here's a scanned example of one of the pages, which not only contains all that lovely felt-tip pen colored art from Sonic 1, but also talks of the characters' "charming and saucy nature". Hmm. No doubt the PAL Sonic 1 box art was nicer, though. More scans after the jump.

Some art scanned from one of the Sonic 2 pages, showing Tails back when he was generally cute and not an annoying little idiot. "Look at all them Eggman's robots" indeed.

The creepy furries may get a kick out of this one. Features some artwork of the badniks from the Game Gear version of Sonic 2, which I can't say I've seen before getting this book before (for all I know they were probably in the Japanese manual)..

Ever wanted large artwork of Streets of Rage? Well here you go! Sadly I couldn't get perfect scans of these what with the page bends though, so a lot of these will have squashed shadowed sides. Still, click on this and you can see all that unnecessary muscle detail closer than if you placed the Mega Drive case against your nose.


This one of Monster lair wasn't going too far into the page dip so I got this one almost just right. Illustrated by , of who's artwork should be familiar to anyone that ever owned a Master System, as the art could be found on many a white gridded box (when they did very rarely put any effort into the art on them that is). This one might even work as a widescreen wallpaper.


This is one of my favorite pieces from the entire book, a real piece of art that's wasted on a tiny Game Gear box but would look great hung up on a wall.


This Phantasy Star II art is also very arty. Has the look of a Moebius illustration, sort of. Now a Panzer Dragoon art book, THAT would be nice.

Outrun artwork by Akira Watanabe (the same guy who did the Sonic 1 and 2 cover art, amongst other Sega art). This wouldn't look out of place framed in a 1980's diner complete with a girl flying around on Rollerblades chewing bubblegum. This image could be all you need on Wikipedia for the word "Sega". Amazing.


And if that wasn't enough airbrushed Outrun goodness for you, here's a poor attempt at a scan of the two page spread of Turbo Outrun. This American dream of driving like an arsehole to show off to your brain dead girlfriend is illustrated so perfectly here.



And finally here's the classic Outrun logo, which might just be the largest copy of it you'll find on the Internet. I could be wrong, though.


I may upload some more scans from the book if anyone wants them, and if they're possible without wreaking the book, and maybe I'll cook up some wallpapers too.

Japanese Sega Art Book of Sheer Beauty

Now, video game art books are by no means a rare thing in Japan, but Sega ones seem to be few and far between. However, I manged to find this one on Ebay some time ago and won it for about £12. The book contains a variety of artwork from many Mega Drive and Game Gear games, starring the main front cover art as full page spends and littered with character art from the lovely full colour manuals they got over there. More after the jump.

The book splits the games into genres: Role playing, Action, Shooting, Driving & Sports, Simulation and Others. Each game has info about the game as well as comments about the art by the artists themselves. better yet, the book is in Japanese and English. It even tells you what art tools were used to produce each piece.

The first bunch of pages in the book present Segas lineup of RPG's. This is a must buy for fans of Phantasy Star and especially the Shining series, which gets 12 pages dedicated to it's various Mega Drive and Game Gear releases at the time, including full page cover images and tons of character art. Other games shown off include Vermilion, Landstalker and Rent a Hero.

In the action section, the longest in the book, Sonic gets a nice six pages dedicated to him, showing off art from Sonic 1 and 2 and well as art for the Game Gear Sonic 2. Did you know the names of all those different animals you could save when you bopped open a badnik? Well look above and now you'll know. I can't say I've ever seen artwork of Beckie the bear before, and take note how she has a white collar thing a lot like Knuckles' one.

There's also 12 pages dedicated to all the Golden Axe games, 5 for Bare Knuckle (Streets of Rage), 5 for Wonder Boy and 6 for Shinobi. No Revenge of Shinobi/Shinobi III art though, it's all from Shadow Dancer and the Game Gear games. Oh well, they're still nice.

Everyone should recognize this Altered Beast artwork, as it was also featured on the western box for what was the first Mega Drive pack-in title. What you may not have seen before the in the left half of the artwork, which was cut off in our boxes but shown in full on the Japanese box.

Alex Kidd also gets a short 2 page look in, although there's none of that classic Master System art, justthe Mega Drive game which in Japan has a crude but cute cover. The less said about any of our Alex Kidd "art" the better.

The Shooting section is pretty small but contains some memorable art from Super Thunder Blade, Space harrier, Gain Ground and Arrow Flash as seen above. This was back in the day when anything remotely anime-looking would be swiftly replaced with serious, realistic characters, but even in Japan it seems anime style art is not too common in the era of Sega games featured. This book was published in 1994, although there doesn't appaer to be any games in here any later than 1992.

The racing & Sports section almost entirely consists of baseball games. There is seven pages of baseball, all very similar to each other. Those Japanese sure love their baseball, but this is a waste of a good few pages. Also featured is the Super Monaco Grand Prix artwork you may remember, and some fantastic Outrun art that I'm going going to attempt to scan in.

Finally the 'Simulation & Other' section features an assortment of games that we mostly didn't get over here, including this Game Gear version of Pengo. The art above is by the same guy that illustrated the Sonic cover art as well as some Outrun art also in the book. As fantastic as it looks is there any particular reason why the penguin in his art looks more like a duck? Mind you, Pengo is also green and red, so what do I know.

I have no idea what this game is. It's the only Mega CD game featured in the book and has this bonkers artwork that even the artist doesn't like.

Over all the book is rather ace and well worth the money I spent on it. The quality of the artwork featured is a mixed bag as was box art from Sega games at the time in general, but the artists notes and fantastic full page spreads for some truly classic games made up for it. You should especially purchase it if you are a fan of Sega's RPG heritage. I'm going to have a go at scanning some pages tomorrow so they can be turned into wallpapers and the like.