After roughly three or four years sitting in front of a computer one can get a little sick of pouring over images created on a computer. Let’s take a refreshing look at a lo-tech, high-skill way of producing a palatable cover…
Looking more like sale sign in a store front window than a book cover, Lauren Weber’s treatise on keeping things frugal uses its mistakes to its advantage. Why spend the money on a fresh piece of paper when you could do the grade school trick of erasing your mistakes and drawing over them bigger and brighter?
Bad Seed follows up And The Ass Saw The Angel two decades later with a story of a traveling salesman with a taste for seducing the women to whom he sells his beauty products. Things get upended in Bunny’s world when his wife commits suicide, thus sending him on a journey with his son, Bunny Jr., to try and escape the guilt he feels and the devil-horned madman who seems to be chasing them.
The UK cover bears mentioning due to its bad-assness and could fill a spot in this department on its own, but we’ve got a theme here and we’re sticking to it.
The US cover veers dangerously close to some sort of Sunset Strip, Ed Hardy, Chateau Marmont bullshit with the pinks and yellows and gothic lettering. It barely (just barely!) gets saved by the smudgy charcoal drawing and the presence of Nick Cave’s name, which could take even the corniest, sequined-est, fake-tanned-est thing and make it cool.
The most compelling title of the bunch is David Small’s Stitches. The memoir of a fucked up childhood, which may sound kind of standard fare for most memoirs, but sounds a hell of a lot more interesting when you find out it’s in graphic novel form by an award-winning children’s author.
Small’s washed out water colors seem like the perfect fit for a story about Kafka-dream/nightmare-reality wherein you wake up one day, you cannot speak and you are told you are expected to die soon.
Summation: Fuck computers. Let’s sling some ink.
