Roger Skateboards
Every once in a while, there comes by something that completely turns your life upside down and after realising its existence in the world, you pretty much can't live without it: (wanking, bacon, half cabs and beer immediately spring to mind) but I cant think of anything recently that has had the same impact as first seeing Roger Skateboards...
As far as I can see, there are very few American companies out today who seem to be taking a personal approach to board graphics and the feel and image of the company as a whole. I for one am bored with leafing through online catalogues seeing the same images and same fonts on 10 different boards with a few colours tweaked on Illustrator for each pro.
As a company, Roger feels a lot more individual and all boards feature the talented and instantly recognisable scribblings of celebrated artist (and part owner) Michael Sieben, carrying various different slogans. These famously include: an inverted cross with "Skate Switch for Jesus" "UH OH A Ghost With A Boner" and "Trouser Snake." etched into them. Sophisticated humour this is not, however from my juvenile moronic perspective it's fucking hilarious and in my opinion is something that skateboarding could do with more of. Basically if I see another slow mo segueway of a wrongun in their sister's jeans balancing a floppy beanie on the back of their heads, pushing through pigeons or doing a bluntslide on a 2ft bankle I'm in serious danger of shitting myself!
The boards themselves are all top drawer. They are well made, rock solid and the ones I tried (Ghost Boner & Weed & Cobras) all seemed to go the distance keeping their shapes and resisting cracks or delams as well as any board can, but even if they didn't I'd still tell you to buy them just for the sheer awesomeness of the graphics and to promote a company whose website has a section called "Ads We Couldn't Afford To Run" with a team rider called "My Friend Brandon"
Any company whose mission statement is "20% Skateboarding, 80% Weed & Cobras" can definitely have my money. There needs to be more boner jokes in skateboarding, we're not Professional Athletes striving to be taken seriously on a par with football players and marathon runners, we're on the whole, immature dickheads that spend far too much time loitering around car parks drinking fizzy pop, drawing winkies on things and calling each other names (or maybe that's just me)...
Either way, I'm backing Roger. I would say that compared to repetitive stale Illustrator'ed graphics which are churned out at rate of knots, they are a breath of fresh air but they'd probably only turn it into a fart joke and spend the next week sniggering anyway...
Nag your local to get them in.
Dickfingers
