I think you'd look great in your underwear standing on a stack of pancakes.
It’s an awkward visual, for sure, and it probably only gets more uncomfortable when you’re saying it out loud to a 78-year-old Baseball Hall of Famer.
For Daniel Jacob Horine, these unusual visions are commonplace. In fact, they are the key to his day job.
So, Horine wasn’t a bit phased when he found himself trying to communicate his unique concept to Baltimore Orioles legendary pitcher Jim Palmer in February 2023.
Horine is an artist who specializes in depicting sports legends in unusual situations, creating comic-book style covers that capture the complexities of athletes’ personalities. Since 2020, his work at Pop Fly Pop Shop has developed a cult following among collectors, many of whom are like Horine: sports fans who grew up obsessed with comic books.
In the case of Palmer, Horine’s vision combined the right-hander’s nickname “Cakes” (Palmer famously ate pancakes on days when he took the mound) with his famed underwear ads for Jockey in the late 1970s.
That’s a far cry from the typical baseball pose of standing with a glove or bat.
“I really love it when the athletes will take a chance, because they're very used to, by and large, traditional baseball art,” Horine said.
“I'm having a conversation with Tommy John saying, ‘I want to give you a robot arm.’ I'm trying to pitch to Jim Palmer: ‘I think you'd look great in your underwear standing on a stack of pancakes.’ These are ways that they're really not used to, and I so appreciate them going on this journey with me.”
Since Pop Fly began its journey in June 2020, Horine has strived to have direct collaboration with the players he draws for his 7-inch x 10.5-inch covers, which are printed on double-thick card stock and released every Sunday night on his website.
The work becomes a true partnership, and the athletes end up having their “creative fingerprints” on the final product.
“It's not just me saying here, here. Sign off on this,” the artist said.
Flip through Horine’s archives at Pop Fly, and you’ll see how vivid his imagination can be — often triggered by the extensive research he does on the players featured in his weekly drops.
There’s Brooks Robinson sucking up items as a human vacuum cleaner, Rod Carew standing tall as a knight in armor, Kent Tekulve twisted in knots as “Rubberband Man,” and Bobby Valentine undercover as a secret agent.
Yes, Horine has depicted many of the milestone moments in baseball history you might expect: Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot,” Carlton Fisk waving the ball fair in the 1975 World Series, Hank Aaron’s 715th homer and Roger Maris’ 61st.
And, yes, he has drawn his share of legendary players such as Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Pete Rose and Nolan Ryan.
But where Horine really gets creative is in capturing some of the most unknown characters and unforgettable moments of the game, often lost to history.
“I'm not super interested in just doing Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig. Those are all important people, full stop. But baseball has 20,000-plus players who have ever played the game,” he said. “There's a lot of interesting stories out there, and a lot of stories that don't get the opportunity to get told.”
So, don’t be surprised when you see Mariners third baseman Lenny Randle blowing a ball foul on the artificial turf at the Kingdome, “Perimeter” Pascual Perez getting lost in Atlanta traffic before a scheduled start on the mound for the Braves, or Dock Ellis floating in a psychedelic haze the day he threw a perfect game for the Pirates.
As a child of the 1980s, Horine, 45, also has paid homage to some of the moments that led those early days of “SportsCenter:” George Brett losing his cool during the “Pine Tar Incident,” Wade Boggs getting overly superstitious as the “Chicken Man,” and Mark Fidrych literally throwing a pitch as “Big Bird” of “Sesame Street.”
What really puts the “pop” in Pop Fly is when sports cross over into movies and TV, a combination that fascinates Horine.
So, when Keith Hernandez makes a cover, it’s not in a Mets jersey, but instead as Elaine Benes’ love interest on “Seinfeld.”
Yes, Horine has featured Reggie Jackson as “Mr. October,” but he also has captured the slugger as the would-be assassin of Queen Elizabeth from “The Naked Gun.”
You’ll also find Charlie Sheen’s “Wild Thing” from “Major League,” Ted Danson’s “Sam Malone” from “Cheers,” and a “League of Their Own” homage featuring All-American Girls Professional Baseball League star Dorothy Kamenshek.
“I love when baseball gets bigger than baseball,” he said. “I love the Bob Ueckers out there. I love the Seinfelds out there, the Bo Jacksons that have expanded the confines of the stadium, and they become pop-culture touch points.”
“Crossover” themes have fascinated Horine since he was a kid growing up in West Covina, California.
Although he spent a lot of time with his father at Dodgers Stadium, Horine was captivated by many of the Bay Area stars of the late 1980s (Rickey Henderson, Mark McGwire, Will Clark and Jose Canseco) and the TBS Atlanta Braves, especially two-time MVP Dale Murphy.
Horine still has the early drawings he did depicting his heroes as comic-book creations: Canseco as 40-40 Man, Henderson as the Man of Steal, and Bo Jackson as a half-robot, half-superstar called “Ro-Bo.”
“When I was 10 years old, my world was split into two hemispheres. One was comics, and the other one was baseball,” he said. “So that's kind of always been there, just marinating in the background.”
Still, when it came time to find a real job, Horine ended up at a place we all go in the Internet age: LinkedIn.
He was working as the associate creative director for the employment site when he decided to try to sell some of his artwork at the DesignerCon convention in L.A. just before the pandemic hit in 2020.
It did not go well.
“I left that convention with pretty much everything I came there with,” he said. “It was yet another kind of project that didn't really land. And it was defeating, because it was the end.
“It didn't quite get the traction. All passion, no traction.”
Later that year, Horine was just messing around with his pen when he drew an image of Clark’s left-handed swing “just to trade with a friend.” However, he later decided to put the finished product in what would become his online store, and it took off with enough sales to “pay the gas bill.”
And with that, the Pop Fly Pop Shop opened its doors.
A few weeks into the project, Horine got the chance to collaborate with Murphy on Pop Fly No. 4, and the artist credits the Atlanta Braves legend for turning “this very humble project into a bigger audience.”
Murphy first met Horine when the artist asked for an autograph at a memorabilia show, and the two have become friends. The two-time NL MVP has been featured on three Pop Fly prints, including the "Power Alley" drawing from the early days: a takeoff of Murphy's famed Nike poster of the same name.
Murphy says Pop Fly prints have become "iconic" for players in the same way he felt honored to be featured on a poster back in his playing days.
"What he has done is blended our love of sports and the comic-book culture and what it represents," Murphy told cllct. "He already, in these few short years, has made his stamp on the art world (and) the collectible world. Guys love to work with him."
By December 2020, Horine was doing a live interview on MLB Network, and that took things to a different level.
“As I'm talking, I can hear in the background the orders — ding, ding, ding, ding — start to roll in on my phone, and that was so exciting. We had never seen anything like that,” he said.
Now, nearly 200 prints later, the shop has become a full-time job for Horine and his wife, Dr. Areni Arslanian. It’s a true “mom and pop” shop, too, as the couple combines to run almost all aspects of the business themselves.
“She truly is everything, and that is not generous ‘husband speak,’ that is the truth of the matter,” Horine said of Areni.
Pop Fly’s business model is fairly simple: A new print is released every Sunday night. Fans have exactly one week to purchase it. And then it goes into the vault, for good.
That limited release has increased the rarity and collectibility of Pop Fly prints, which have found a robust secondary market on eBay. Still, Horine said he isn’t tempted to change the model to extend his commerce window, and he remains committed to the idea of each print being available for just seven days.
Horine has branched out into doing football prints and said he’d love to do basketball and soccer — but his first love remains baseball.
He was asked to be one of the contributing artists for the Topps 100 project, and eight of his prints hang in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Both developments still leave Horine in disbelief.
“I keep just trying to connect the two dots of me sitting on the floor with my buddies as a kid, trading Topps cards to now being an adult, having my artwork on a Topps card,” he said.
Horine has passed the passion along to his son, Daniel Jr., who has followed his father into ballparks and met a few legends along the way. Daniel Jr. was even featured in a 2022 Pop Shop print, an homage to Big League Chew for Pop Fly No. 95, which Horine said ranks as his favorite.
“Him being front and center on a piece is emotionally significant to me,” he said.
Horine said the average Pop Fly takes him 20 to 25 hours to draw, but that process doesn’t even begin until he has spent hours researching everything he can find on his subjects. It can take days to unlock that special creative combination, and the Sunday night deadline is always looming.
Sometimes, it’s a nickname. Sometimes, it’s a moment.
In the case of Jim Palmer, it was both.
“I had a finished version of him in an Orioles uniform. It was fine, but then it hit me: He was so culturally iconic because of those Jockey underwear ads. With those ads, he became bigger than baseball,” Horine said. “So, I redrew the image of him on the pancakes, but this time in his underwear. I knew that was the direction I needed to go.
“The only question was whether he was going to be onboard with it? It was definitely a risk.”
The wait for that answer was interminable for Horine, who had both versions of the drawing ready to print.
As the release date rapidly approached, Palmer went radio silent. The Baltimore legend had been very communicative early in the process, but he wasn’t providing an answer, and Horine started to worry he might be offended by the underwear depiction.
“I never did find out what the holdup was, but at the 11th hour, I finally hear from Jim,” Horine said. “He loves it. The pancake version it is. He never even saw the uniform version.”
While Palmer loved it, not every fan did.
Horine is accustomed to reading comments like, “Why would I want that on my wall?” when he takes a chance like he did with Palmer or when he drew a shirtless Bartolo Colon in a Pop Fly released entitled “Big Sexy.”
“It definitely costs me some sales to feature an athlete like that, instead of how people are used to seeing them. I get it,” he said. "But these are the kinds of pieces that define what this project is all about. They help set the boundaries of what I’m trying to do. …
“Jim Palmer has had hundreds, maybe even thousands, of artists depict him over the years. But I want to be the artist who tells a unique story with my work, one that people will be talking about for years to come. Same goes for any of the athletes I depict.
“I’m not here to make decorations. I’m here to tell stories.”
Kevin Jackson is the Chief Content Officer for cllct. He spent 25 years at ESPN Digital Media, where he was the founding editor of Page 2, and nearly four years as Executive Director for Digital Content at FOX Sports.