Dandadan runs on a simple argument between two teenagers. Momo Ayase, whose grandmother is a spirit medium, believes in ghosts and thinks aliens are nonsense. Ken Takakura, an occult-obsessed boy she nicknames Okarun, believes in aliens and thinks ghosts are nonsense. They dare each other to visit the other's haunted spot, and both turn out to be right on the same night.
That split — yokai on one side, aliens on the other — is the whole shape of the series. Here is who the players are and what each of them actually is.
Where the artwork in our Dandadan collection depicts one of these, it is linked in the section that explains it.
Yokai versus aliens: the split
Most supernatural series pick one flavor of the unexplained. Dandadan insists on both and keeps them distinct. Its yokai are folklore creatures: tied to a place, bound by conditions, able to be sealed or bargained with. Its aliens are tabloid abductors: craft, technology, and a physical demand on human beings.
What links them is the pair at the center of the story, who end up carrying one of each: Momo's power comes from the spirit side of her family, and Okarun's is a curse borrowed from a yokai.
The title is the sound of that collision — the percussive "dan dan dan" of things hitting. Our Dan Dan Dan tee and Dan Dan Dan Onslaught tee take the title itself; the Yokai Burst tee and Paranormal Company tee are drawn from the crowd of spirits and visitors the pair keep running into.
Both sides of the story
Turbo Granny
Turbo Granny is adapted from a real Japanese urban legend: an old woman who runs alongside cars on the highway at impossible speed. In the series she haunts a tunnel, and Okarun walks into it on the night of the bet. She takes something from him — the story is blunt that it was his testicles, and treats the loss as both a running joke and a real stake — and leaves him carrying a piece of her curse.
Two things make her more than a monster of the week. She is bound: her power is tied to her territory, and once Momo and Okarun work that out they can fight her on terms she cannot dictate. And she is not simply evil. She preys on the vulnerable, but the series gives her a reason and a code, and once beaten she becomes something closer to a bad-tempered ally.
She is the most-drawn subject in our collection. The Turbo Granny tee is the plainest treatment; the Turbo Granny and Spirits tee puts her in the crowd she runs with; the Turbo Granny Faceoff tee takes the confrontation in the tunnel. The Turbo Two, Turbo Duo and Turbo Chaos tees are variations on her and the boy she cursed.
Turbo Granny pieces
The Serpo aliens
While Okarun is in the tunnel, Momo is at an abandoned hospital that is supposed to be a UFO hotspot, and it is. The beings that take her are the Serpo, named after a real UFO conspiracy story about a supposed exchange program with a planet of that name. In the series they are small, gray, bulbous-headed and unnervingly polite about what they intend to do.
What they want is bodies. The Serpo are presented as a species that has lost the ability to reproduce on its own and has come to Earth looking for what it lacks, and Momo is not the first girl they have taken. There is no seal for them; they have to be beaten. Which is what Momo does, because the abduction is where her own power wakes up.
Okarun's spirit form
Okarun comes out of the tunnel possessed. Turbo Granny's curse sits inside him and, when it takes over, it changes him: the quiet, round-faced boy becomes a lean, long-limbed figure with a dark, mask-like face, glowing eyes and a grin wider than a human one should be. He gains her speed and loses most of his own control.
The turn that makes the series work is that he learns to use it. With Momo's help — her power can literally take hold of the spirit inside him — Okarun can call the transformation on purpose, sprint, and hit with a yokai's force while staying himself.
That transformation is on more of our artwork than his ordinary face. The Okarun Turbo Spirit tee draws the possessed form directly; the Okarun I Wanna Go Home tee is his honest reaction to all of it; the Okarun Occult Fanatic tee is the boy who walked into the tunnel in the first place. The Spirit Bend tee takes the moment the curse is pulled into shape.
Okarun pieces
Momo's psychic power
Momo's ability is psychokinesis, and it wakes up in the worst possible place: on the Serpo craft, under threat. It shows as an aura she can shape into hands, and those hands shove, lift, hold and throw with far more force than her own arms.
The important thing is what it can grip. Momo can take hold of things that have no body — the spirit inside Okarun, for one — and that makes her the anchor of the pair rather than its support. It also runs in the family: her grandmother Seiko is a working medium, and Momo's ability is the family trade arriving in a new form.
She is also the reason he is called Okarun. His real name, Ken Takakura, is shared with an old film star her family reveres, and she refuses to use it for him; "Okarun" is a contraction of "Occult-kun". The Momo Ayase tee draws her alone; the Psychic Flux tee takes the aura; the Okarun x Momo Union tee and the Chaos Pair tee draw the two together.
The cat on the windowsill
One detail people wear without always knowing why. After Turbo Granny is beaten, Seiko seals her into a maneki-neko — the ceramic beckoning cat with one raised paw that sits in shop windows across Japan. From then on, the yokai that terrorized a tunnel is a small cat figurine with an old woman's voice.
It is a good joke and a very Japanese one: the maneki-neko is a charm for luck and custom, and the series uses it to house something that brings neither. It also gives the character a second silhouette that reads instantly on cloth. The Beckoning Cat tee is that form — the quietest piece in the collection, for anyone who would rather wear the reference than the monster.
How this translates onto cloth
Dandadan is drawn with unusually dense line work, and that is exactly the kind of artwork that has to be simplified before it will read on a garment. The pieces above work because each settles on a single figure or moment: Turbo Granny's face, Okarun's possessed silhouette, Momo inside her aura, the cat.
Everything in the collection is printed with a bonded matte finish on garment-washed, pre-shrunk cotton, so the artwork sits flat and the size you unbox is close to the size you keep. Where the print sits — chest, back or two-sided — is stated on each product page, and measurements for every size are published on the sizing page.
The whole set is in the Dandadan collection.
Read next: Chainsaw Man's devils and contracts, for another series where the supernatural is negotiated with, and Jujutsu Kaisen's domains and cursed energy, the other big story about curses that can be borrowed.
Torazen designs are independent fan-inspired work — not affiliated with or endorsed by the rights holders. Character and series names are used to describe what the artwork refers to.