Soda Pressing

Twenty years ago this year, Coca-Cola attempted to cash in on the Generation X craze by creating and marketing their own unique fruity concoction to that potentially lucrative, albeit slovenly demographic. By some unknown process, Coke ended up settling on Daniel Clowes as one of the artists recruited for the project, and the male/female designs above were his contribution to that particular ad campaign. A decade back, we lucked out and found the 21x21 male subway slat via a collector in Boston, and earlier this month we were able to match it up with a previously unseen female version. 

OK Soda was only available in certain test markets (detailed here) for a little over two years, so turning up any promotional materials remains relatively tough. Complicating matters even further, a young guerrilla artiste named Shepard Fairey took it upon himself to replace these subway-specific advertisements—in Boston and Providence, two of the few locales that would've likely received them—with his own reinterpretations, in an earnest effort to reclaim the underground culture coopted by conformist, corporate hacks.