Set in the fictional town of Charming, California, FX's Sons of Anarchy details the lives and crimes of the titular gun-running outlaw motorcycle gang. And if you think Game of Thrones is bloody, Sons of Anarchy can be just as bloody. So bloody, in fact, that you need a spreadsheet just to get to the bottom of who killed whom and why over the course of the show's seven seasons.
A huge Sons of Anarchy fan after a six-season Netflix binge section, Armin Vit, founder of the Under Consideration's network of design blogs, had such a spreadsheet. So he decided to tame it, and turn it into a wonderfully bloody infographic for fellow Sons of Anarchy fans.
Featuring portrait illustrations and kill icons by Taylor Goad, "A Graphic Registry of Life & Death In Sons of Anarchy" was a labor of love for Vit.
"As a diversion from my day-to-day life which involves all kinds of princess stuff and reading Dora the Explorer books, I easily get consumed by any show with a slight degree of depravity. And showrunner Kurt Sutter knows how to deliver on that," Vit says. "By season six, pretty much every different gang or club or organization had been involved in either a feud or a loving relationship but they still all killed each other, regardless of race or gender. I didn't want to celebrate the multiple killings gratuitously but I thought it would be interesting to visualize just how tangled and complex these were. The fact that there were dozens of characters involved made it more juicy to me."
Once Vit had compiled all of his data into a spreadsheet, he loaded it up into Illustrator and started sculpting the data as best he could. "The chart has around 170 characters and around 110 of them die, so that's a lot of red lines to manage," explains Vit. "I picked a design approach and structure early on and just tried to make it as clear as possible on the go."
If you're an honorary member of the S.A.M.C.R.O. or someone who plans on binge-watching Sons of Anarchy now that the show is over, the poster can be purchased for $30 here.