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Cat Palace Screen Printing owners Dawn and Jesse Garza pose with samples of the black-light posters they print at their workshop in Selma. The Garzas started doing the retro posters around three years ago and specialize in horror- and hard rock-themed posters.

A "Halloween" black-light poster designed by artist Marty "Riet" McEwen and printed by Cat Palace Screen Printing in Selma.

A black-light poster of Eddie Munson from "Stranger Things" designed by artist Marty "Riet" McEwen and printed by Cat Palace Screen Printing in Selma.

An official Foo Fighters black-light tour poster designed by artist Jason Malmberg and printed by Cat Palace Screen Printing in Selma.

A "Beetlejuice" black-light poster designed by artist Marty "Riet" McEwen and printed by Cat Palace Screen Printing in Selma.

A "Lost Boys" black-light poster designed by artist Marty "Riet" McEwen and printed by Cat Palace Screen Printing in Selma.

Black-light posters were all the rage in the 1960s and '70s with their psychedelic depictions of acid trips, mythical creatures and Jimi Hendrix. Half a century later, a married couple from San Antonio have reanimated the old hippie art form with modern horror and monsters of rock.

Picture “Halloween’s” Michael Myers looming over a haunted house and terrified trick-or-treaters like a neon giant. Or a trippy tour poster for Foo Fighters with floating mountains and a flying van. Or headbanger Eddie Munson from “Stranger Things” lighting up the Upside Down with his glowing guitar.

These are just a few examples of the ultraviolet wall art coming out of Cat Palace Screen Printing, Dawn and Jesse Garza's print shop in Selma. Cat Palace specializes in artist-designed skateboards, stickers, T-shirts and now flocked black-light posters, including a few commissioned works for some big-name clients.

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Dawn Garza hangs up some flocked black-light posters at Cat Palace Screen Printing. She and her husband Jesse have been printing the vintage-style posters for the past three years.

Since picking up the printing process three years ago, the Garzas have produced licensed black-light posters for Foo Fighters, Primus and, most recently, actor Daniel Roebuck, who plays Grandpa in Rob Zombie’s reboot of “The Munsters,” which hits Netflix and home video today.

Meanwhile, the Garzas also have printed artistic homages to “Creepshow,” “The Lost Boys” and other fan art frights that have collectors screaming for more.

It’s a fresh spin on a vintage format that has the couple seeing poster art in a whole new light.

“In a way we’re kind of helping to bring that back a little bit,” Jesse Garza said. “We didn’t set out to do that. But once we started doing this and realizing all the potential and just how beautiful these prints look, it just becomes more and more something that we want to pursue.”

Flocking is a technique that adds fuzzy black fibers to a black-light poster for greater contrast with the fluorescent inks. A popular practice during the posters’ heyday, today most flocked black-light posters are made overseas, usually only for large print runs that can be cost-prohibitive to artists and take months to fulfill.

Cat Palace is one of just a handful of companies in the United States that specialize in small runs of flocked black-light posters, usually just 50 copies of the highest quality.

Dawn Garza refers to herself and her husband as the middlemen for a growing number of poster artists who hire them to print their work. They include Donny "Dirty Donny" Gillies, who counts AC/DC, Kiss and Metallica as his clients; Craig Gleason, the artist behind the Primus tour poster; and Marty "Riet" McEwen, who designed the “Munsters” poster at Roebuck’s request.

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The Garzas’ journey into black-light poster printing started in 2019 when Jesse was invited to be part of a book dedicated to artists on Instagram. Jesse, a veteran screen printer who launched Cat Palace with Dawn in 1996, offered to make a flocked poster of the book cover to promote its release.

There was just one problem.

Jesse Garza prepares to make a batch of posters at Cat Palace Screen Printing, a print shop in Selma he runs with his wife, Dawn.  

“I had never done a flocked poster before,” he said while in the Garzas’ studio as Dawn chuckled in the background. “But I thought, well, how hard can it be?”

It was so hard, it turned out, that Jesse ruined the first batch when all the flocking fell off. But he had to find a way to make it work and finish the poster or the artist friend who hired him would be out of a job.

One YouTube tutorial and a lot of trial and error later, Jesse came up with a proprietary technique he will only say is “the best way” to do it.

“Now we’re discovering how amazing poster printing is,” he said. “We really are loving it.”

Black-light posters' trippy origins date back to the early 1930s with two brothers and a head injury.

In 1933, Robert Switzer fractured his skull and severed an optic nerve while unloading tomatoes from a Heinz freight car in Berkeley, Calif. Doctors confined him to a dark room to recover his sight, which took several months. During that time, he and his chemist brother Joseph Switzer experimented with fluorescent compounds, using a black light to identify the organic elements in their father’s pharmacy storeroom. The brothers created fluorescent ink by mixing the compounds with shellac.

The first use for the fluorescent paint was for a different sort of head trip. Joseph Switzer also was an amateur magician and would use the black light ink on a Balinese dancer to make it look as if her head was separating from her body.

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The Switzer brothers formed what’s now the DayGlo Color Corp. in Cleveland, Ohio, to market their fluorescent paints for advertising displays and later the war effort during World War II, when DayGlor colors were used to paint aircraft and safeguard troops with fluorescent fabrics.

Cat Palace Screen Printing owners Dawn and Jesse Garza pose with samples of the black-light posters they print at their workshop in Selma. The Garzas specialize in horror- and hard rock-themed posters.

Black light posters were popularized by the psychedelic subculture of the late 1960s, as artists tried to emulate the surreal sights and sounds associated with psychedelic drugs such as LSD.

Some Cat Palace posters do revisit those heady themes. A few of the black-light works they've printed feature VW Buses with wizards and other mystic beings, while others leave little to the imagination with their more overt drug imagery.

Regardless of their subject matter, black-light posters have become so lucrative for the Garzas that they plan to add another building to their 5-acre plot just for poster production. They’ve already maxed out their current working space, Dawn said, and they’re in talks to do a poster run three times their usual 50-print run for country singer Miranda Lambert.

“We are the poster flocking people of not only Texas but of the United States,” Dawn said. “We really think we can build this into something that’s huge.”

rguzman@express-news.net | Twitter: @reneguz