This week's Baltimore City Paper--a publication I occasionally write for--has a cover story on Baltimore hip-hop with a focus on Baltimore rap of the past and how it informs and sometimes, doesn't inform what's going on in the rap scene today. The cover story "The Elements of Style" is worth checking out, but of special interest to comics fans would be the bonus interviews with Baltimore graffers Alco and Boodamonk:
Just click "Play" on the video above and don't think too hard. This appropriately drowsy ad for the KID ROBOT's Quasimoto action figure's backed by the music of Madlib, whose alter-ego is the helium-voiced Alf/Ant-eater/itdoesn'treallymatter Id that is Quasimoto, sometimes Lord Quas. And now it's this figure that comes in Yellow and Blue, with awesome art by STONES THROW records' art director Jeff Jank:
Jank's artwork is the perfect analogue to STONES THROW's personal and personable hip-hop. Like a Madlib beat which'll sample some dope Melvin Van Peebles record or some weird-ass Bollywood crooner, Jank's pulls from any and anywhere, with a focused, distinctly professional sense of design that's throwback but then, a mindfully handmade, looks-like-doodling drawing style. His drawings looked scratched-out on paper like he never lifted his pencil from the paper while drawing and although his lines wobble, there's a really crazy sense of consistency to the wobble that trips you up.
Notice the hand-drawn sense you get from the "Q" sign on the cover to Quasimoto's The Unseen or the contrast between computerized shading and gradients on that same cover or on Further Adventures and how somehow, it like works right along with the dotted grit of the building's bricks AND the photographs of people placed, collage-like in some of the windows. It has the same insane but perfect sense of contrast and complement as something like Jack Kirby's collages.
This cover for J. Dilla's masterpiece Donuts is crazy on the perspective, but also feels like some kind of weird, captured-from-life image realist image too. Brandon Graham's work is perhaps the best example of what I'm talking about, where somehow it's bubbly, inherent cartoony-ness is so well-rendered that it feels as real as some hyper-realistic painting of the same thing. Something about those angled, nervous lines that mark the different window panes on the shop that accomplishes more than a straight-edge...
There's also just a charm to Jank's work, as seen in the gold-toofed donut gobbler or that Dragonball Turtle Master-esque dude (wonderfully named by Jank, "Lord Wigflip")...
-Promo for B-Ball Zombie War Compilation featuring Lord Wig Flip!
-"Bullyshit"
-"Don't Blink" (Incredible fan-made Lord Quas animation)
The new issue of Wax Poetics features, among other great things, an interview with graphic designer Cey Adams. Adams is best known as an early graffiti writer, in-house designer for DEF JAM records during the 80s, and brains behind plenty of iconic hip-hop album covers (Ready to Die, Fear of a Black Planet) and could've been one of many dudes to make a book that bigs himself up exclusively, but instead he's gone ahead and made a crazy compendium/history of rap inspired design called DEFinition:The Art & Design of Hip-Hop.
Among the many things Adams and interviewer Michael A. Gonzales (himself something of a legend, check him out at Riffs & Revolutions) get into is illustration and hip-hop and the connection to comics. Adams was responsible for hiring the great Bill Sienkiewicz to paint the cover of EPMD's Business as Usual. A bunch of years later, Sienkiewicz would do the cover of RZA's Bobby Digital album as well- a great mix of Sienkiewicz's hyper-real style of illustration meeting up with those explosive 70s blaxploitation movie painted posters.
Adams also discusses the hiring of children's book illustrator Ed Renfro to do the art for the Beastie Boys' Hello Nasty, which as far I can tell, never came to fruition beyond this great T-shirt design:
Another fascinating aspect of the article is Adams discussing the cover art of Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet and how the idea, after it was conceptualized by Chuck D, they decided to find "an illustrator that really unders[tood] how the solar system works" and they got B.E Johnson who had worked for NASA! One of the coolest parts of Adams' book is the presentation of Johnson's original painting without any graphics on it, just this Public Enemy logo on the moon and then earth and nebulas and awesome space shit floating around behind it:
This week's Baltimore City Paper--a publication I occasionally write for--has a cover story on Baltimore hip-hop with a focus on Baltimore rap of the past and how it informs and sometimes, doesn't inform what's going on in the rap scene today. The cover story "The Elements of Style" is worth checking out, but of special interest to comics fans would be the bonus interviews with Baltimore graffers Alco and Boodamonk:
