Weirdly wonderful Beetles are a major presence in the Seattle Art Cars fleet. One of the strangest of all was concocted by artist Tom Swanson of Columbia City, who transformed this ancient bug into one of the liveliest, most colorful VWs of all. Covered with puns, misspellings and arch humor, SHANK is one of the most subversive Art Cars on the roads of the Great Green Groovy Northwest.

Seen here at Seattle's Art Car Blow-Out 2000, SHANK is a thematic tribute to the principle that you can't get ahead. When you score that big raise and start exulting about your good fortune, it's a sure recipe for circumstances that will bust you back to Square One. Your car is vandalized and your landlord raises the rent $250 a month--there goes the raise, and besides, you get a sick headache from worrying about it. That's SHANK.

Shank itself got shanked while parked near home home in Fremont a few months after the Blow-Out. During a drunken rampage, a driver in an uninsured, stolen car took out the Beetle's driver's side door and pillar before plowing into two other parked cars on the street, upending a utility pole, and crashing through the plate-glass front windows of a dry cleaners'. Take a look at that same side after the crash: That's SHANK!