Music
Robert Crumb's chat with Red Bull Music Academy inspired us to explore comic artists' album covers.
Robert Crumb's rare interview with Red Bull Music Academy magazine highlighted, in a roundabout way, the inextricable link between pop music and comic books.
Slipknot’s Corey Taylor, Coheed and Cambria’s Claudio Sanchez, The Sea and Cake’s Archer Prewitt, Gerard Way, Tom Morrello, MF Grimm, Jeffrey Lewis – they all pen comics. The Wu-Tang's RZA is working with Grant Morrison on turning Happy! into a film, and a number of artists have made pop videos, written The Beatles and Prince into comics, or documented whole scenes.
With this in mind, and inspired by Crumb's Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills album cover, we’ve dug out a few more comic-book album sleeves.
GZA’s Liquid Swords by Denys Cowan
One of the finest Wu solo albums there is also features their most memorable cover art, courtesy of Marvel and DC's Denys Cowan. He brought his inner-city inspired work on various titles to bear on GZA's dystopian, chess- and martial arts-inspired masterpiece.
Wolfmother’s Wolfmother by Frank Frazetta
Frazetta was a sci-fi and Western nut who married the bonkers prog-rock suited style of the former to the romance of the latter. After assisting on big name sci-fi franchises in the '50s he was brought to the attention of the pop world after penning Ringo for Mad and commissions for LP art came flooding in. In 2005 Australia's Zep-loving, elf-referencing Wolfmother borrowed from his The Sea Witch work.
Johnny Cash’s Everybody Loves a Nut by Jack Davis
Jack Davis was one of Mad Magazine's founding artists, chosen by Mad's Harvey Kurtzman for his freaky characters with distorted and enlarged anatomy. Two of Davis's most famous commissions were Johnny Cash's Everybody Loves a Nut and The Greatest of The Guess Who?
Gorillaz's Demon Days by Jamie Hewlett
The co-creator of Tank Girl, Jamie Hewlett, has had a long relationship with pop music. In the mid-90s he worked with Britpop band Pulp, creating a comic strip for their Common People album. He's most famous, however, for the animated characters and album artwork for Damon Albarn's Gorillaz outfit.
Sonic Youth’s Goo by Raymond Pettibon
Raymond Pettibon brought his provocative style to Sonic Youth's 1990 album Goo to create one of alt-rock's most iconic images – based on a paparazzi shot of Maureen Hindley and her husband David Smith, witnesses in the infamous Moors murders case in 1966. Pettibon also designed Black Flag's four-bars logo and inked covers for Foo Fighters, Mike Watt and OFF!
The Ramones’ Road to Ruin by John Holmstrom
John Holmstrom was involved in punk rock as early as 1975, founding Punk Magazine and later telling the history of punk in comic-strip form for Spin. He was perfectly placed, then, to capture the self-styled cartoon image of NY's bubblegum punk-pop heroes The Ramones.
The Groundhogs’ Who Will Save the World? The Mighty Groundhogs by Neal Adams
Neal Adams has done it all – Batman, Green Arrow, Superman, X-Men, you name it. He's also a right-on dude who fights for artists' creative rights. So it was something of a coup when Dave Grohl's beloved psychedelic blues monsters The Groundhogs persuaded Adams to pen the band as superhero characters on their speaker-blowing 1972 album.
Sub Pop 200 by Charles Burns
Black Hole creator Charles Burns was discovered by Art Spiegelman, who published Burns' early work in his alternative comic-book magazine RAW in the early 1980s. He also created the guitar-thrashing monster for Sub Pop's grunge-encapsulating Sub Pop 200 compilation.
