Monday, September 24, 2012

Mike Carroll & Rick Howard.



The next two weeks are going to be a look back at the early days of Girl. There will be a little taste of Chocolate, too.

Rick and Mike were riding for Plan B until the fall of 1993. During their tenure with the company, they developed some ideas for what they wanted skateboarding to be that were different from how things were at the B. The two figured that they could do their own company and partnered with Spike Jonze and Megan Baltimore to launch Girl. This was their last ad for Plan B.

Has there ever been an article on the history of Girl? I figured that there would have been a 15 Things page in Skateboarder, but there wasn't one that I could find. I think I can get this mostly from memory, but I wouldn't mind having something in print to look at. I'm also a little curious about some of the people who worked at Girl over the years, particularly in who was a real person and who was an alias used by Spike or Rick. It's hard to tell sometimes when they are joking around and when they are being serious. That's part of the appeal of Girl, but at the same time it leaves you wondering.

The photos are by Carl Hyndman. Carl did a lot of the artwork for Plan B.

Thrasher - November 1993 Volume 13 Number 11

2 comments:

Keith said...

Hard to remember but I think the Fantastic Four series might have been the last before they left.

justin said...

It could be. Those were summer 1993, I believe. I've been trying to piece together an actual time line for the events.

From what I've found in the mags, and this seems to take a little longer than it should have, was that the Girl split went down at the Back To The City Contest in SF on Labor Day weekend. Give or take a few weeks. Nothing was in print about it until December 1993. Even given the much slower turn around with print media back then, it seems like Plan B wouldn't have been running an ad of Rick and Mike in November. I see the Dorks thing as maybe a slight against them, but it feels more playful than a dis. Maybe they just got there ads in ahead of time.