If you’ve been to the Swansea Walmart recently and made it home with your car in one piece, that's an accomplishment worth bragging about. 

Illustrator and graphic artist Richard Fonseca has just the thing. 

Fonseca’s Teepublic store is packed with fun designs of his own creation — including T-shirts reading “I survived the mall lot pot holes — Swansea, MA.” 

“It’s an adventure. It’s like off-roading,” Fonseca joked. 

Even before the Swansea Mall shut down in 2019, the parking lot had been badly neglected, with craters that might look more at home on the moon. Since then, Walmart, Prime Storage and His Providence Church have kept the site active, but the lot’s condition has deteriorated to the point that some routes might be tough for even a Land Rover to get through. 

“It’s been maybe a year and a half since I even attempted to go through the Sears way. That’s the most drastic," Fonseca said. “The potholes are the size of a small car. I’ve read online in [Facebook] groups about people blowing out their axles and whatnot. 

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Fonseca decided to have a little fun with it, whipped up a design, and posted it to his Teepublic store, where people can buy shirts, mugs, stickers or even face masks with the “I survived” logo. And because the parking lot's abysmal condition is so notorious locally, he’s made a decent number of sales. 

“The ongoing thing between everybody locally is, 'What’s your way of getting there?’” he said. 

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Fonseca grew up in and still lives with his wife and son in the Somerset and Swansea area. He studied illustration at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and has created hundreds of logos for his Teepublic store over the years. At the moment, he has 245 designs for sale on a range of products. 

“There’s endless ideas and designs I like to put up there,” he said.  

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Fonseca’s designs are often tweaks of pop culture, everything from “Star Wars” to sports to “Stranger Things” to pro wrestling to heavy metal, but he has several designs that trade on local nostalgia, like shirts with the Mark You restaurant sign and the Lincoln Park logo. They reflect tastes and experiences that are personal but still universal — even if that just means weaving around horrendous gashes in the road on the way to Walmart. 

“I throw these longshot designs that are kind of tongue-in-cheek or pop-culture-related, and I’m like, ‘I hope they like the stuff I like,’ because basically that’s what I design for,” he said. “I do it to make myself laugh, and if somebody else catches on, then it’s gravy.” 

Dan Medeiros can be reached at dmedeiros@heraldnews.com. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Herald News today.