Gothic Mascots…a Story of Failure

OK, I’m not going to sugarcoat it, my idea for today’s blog post did not work out.  I was going to write about Gothic mascots—a perfectly serviceable mashup of two favorite Ferrebeekeeper tags—but, when I got home from work and started researching gothic mascots the pickings turned out to be exceedingly slim—a Simpsons gag (the Montreal vampire), a bunch of troubling Lolita cartoons, and those godawful “Capital One” barbarians who are trying to sell you some sort of credit card (are they even Visigoths? Is “Capital One” even really a real credit card?).  Apparently nobody wants any sort of gothic mascots except for predatory lenders.

Oh no!–what if Capital One destroys my credit rating for making fun of them? [collapses laughing]

So I ended up looking with increasing desperation at past mascots for anything of any interest and this line of inquiry lead me back to that Simpson’s joke about the Montreal vampire.  Montreal is a francophone city—beautiful and evocative—yet prone to making choices which are different from the market-driven choices of other places.  What was the mascot of the 1976 Montreal Olympics?  And, Bingo! suddenly I had today’s blog post.

This is Amik the beaver.  Amik means beaver in Algonquin—so this character (which looks like it was designed by somebody who just spilled an entire bottle of India ink) is really named “Beaver the beaver.” Anik appears with a red stripe with the Montreal Games logo on it or sometimes with a pre (?) pride rainbow strip.

I am making fun of poor Anik because I don’t think beavers lack faces.  Nor are they the unsettling pure black of absolute oblivion.  Maybe I found my Gothic mascot after all—in the most unlikely of places—Montreal, 1976!  I will write a better post tomorrow. In the meantime enjoy the strange juxtaposition of nihilism and naivete which was seventies design.