My first encounter with bats happened when I was six years old. The neighborhood I lived in had a block party every year. The cookout would be at one of the other houses in the neighborhood, and then everyone would come over to my family's house because it had a pool. The year I was six, the kids kept swimming even after it got dark, and as we were still swimming a bat started flying around the yard. A couple of the parents were concerned, and one or two of the younger kids were scared, but most of the kids thought it was cool.

Then the bat decided to strafe the pool. It didn't hit any of the kids, but it did fly a little less than a foot above the head of one of the kids. Suddenly the kids didn't think the bat was cool.

It was beyond cool.

So with that in mind, it only stands to reason that any team with a name involving bats has a head start in the coolness department. All they have to do is avoid screwing things up.

The Austin Ice Bats do not avoid this.

The trouble begins with the name. There are over a thousand species of bat, but none of them are called the Ice Bat. (I admit I didn't actually look up the names of every species, but let's call it a hunch.) No, this is just another stupid use of the "Ice" prefix for no particular reason. "Austin Bats" would be a cool name. "Austin Ice Bats" is not.

Then there's the fact that we're dealing with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Ice Bat. The Red-Nosed and Red-Eyed Ice Bat, for that matter. All I can figure is that his eyes are hopelessly bloodshot after drowning his sorrows (what sorrows? from not being allowed to join in any ice bat games, of course).

And, of course, the obligatory hockey stick. The hockey stick is there things truly get problematic. Overall, I like the logo, and I'm inclined to forgive the stick and puck because of the really cool moon/sky background. But then I look more closely at the stick and I see a few problems. First, it looks like the stick warps under his right (viewer's left) feet. On one side the angled-up side of the shaft if narrower than the angled-down side; on the other, it's wider. Or, to put it more succinctly, it's drawn poorly. I suppose it could be intentional (in which case we'd be dealing with M.C. Escher the Red-Nosed and Red-Eyed Ice Bat), but I don't think it is.

The feet (which you can't see, but we'll get to that in a minute), are also placed wrong. I'm no chiropterist, but I have looked at a couple of pictures of bats on the internet (as you can see, I'm a firm believer in extremely thorough research), and on those I saw, the legs are actually attached to the wings -- basically the wing, leg, and torso meet at a single point. So the way this bat's legs are connected to its body make no sense unless that isn't really a bat at all, but rather a falcon dressing up as a bat for a costume party (yes, it's M.C. Escher the Red-Nosed and Red-Eyed Falcon Dressed as an Ice Bat).

(Speaking of costumes: If you look to the left of the screen, you will see how I dressed up for Halloween at my office last year. This has nothing to do with the Austin Ice Bats, or much of anything else for that matter, but I rather like the costume and this seems as good an excuse as any to put the picture up.)

Now on to the true masterpiece of gaudiness, those gloves. They're giving me a bit of a problem with the scoring, to be honest. Ordinarily, I'd say that having gloves on a creature's hands is an automatic anthropomorphization penalty. So I'm tempted to do that here. There's just one thing: the bat doesn't have gloves on its hands. It has gloves on its feet, which implies that where feet should be, there are hands instead. That's clearly some form of morphization, but I don't think it's the anthro kind. Part of me thinks that means it's off the hook on the anthropomorphization penalty, and part of me thinks it should be ruled egregious (not to mention gross). And that's just the beginning. Just in that one piece of equipment we've got 1) gloves 2) with a flag 3) of Texas, and which therefore render the logo 4) colorful (or would, were it not for the eyes and nose), and which are being worn 5) on the feet of 6) an animal that couldn't wear gloves anywhere. Damn near every point this logo earns is because of those gloves. Considering the fact that by my estimate the gloves only account for roughly 1/20 of the entire logo, that's pretty impressive.

And finally, you've got the puck which is floating in mid-air for no discernible reason. The best I can figure is that it's actually puck-shaped bat guano.

Still, all in all I'm inclined to go easy on this thing. Despite all the questionable things, there really is a lot to like in this logo. As I said, the moon/sky thing is really cool. The way the bat in the foreground (and one of the bats in the background) go beyond the circle keeps it from being too symmetrical. I like the fact that they properly portrayed the bat as grey instead of solid black. (They should know. There's a colony in Austin that has about 1.5 million bats in it. Seriously. That's where the name comes from.) I like the no-nonsense lettering for the team name. And I'm impressed at the way they managed to put together a logo which is undoubtedly colorful (it has seven different colors) but somehow makes all those colors work together.

In short, lots of positives and lots of negatives. Certainly not the best logo, but certainly not the worst. In fact, it just may be the best of the logos that truly exemplify why I started this website.

Now, sing it with me:

M.C. Escher, the Red-Nosed and Red Eyed Falcon Dressed as an Ice Bat,
Had a very shiny nose and a very shiny pair of eyes!
And if you ever saw them,
You would even say they--

Aw, forget it...

Final Score: 61 points.
Penalties: Ice, 9 pts; Compound, 13 pts; Anthropomorphization, 10 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equip-logo (doubly-egregious), 11 pts; Colorful, 13 pts; State (egregious), 6 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -3 pts.