A few years back, Universal Music Enterprises announced a new deal with Marvel Entertainment that would bring back their Hip-Hop Variant program. The program puts Marvel characters into famous hip-hop album covers for special edition reissues. LL Cool J’s ‘Mama Said Knock You Out’ featuring artwork from Tim Bradstreet’s ‘Punisher #1,’ 50 Cent’s ‘Get Rich or Die Tryin’ featuring artwork from Brian Stelfreeze’s ‘Invincible Iron Man #1’ and GZA’s ‘Liquid Swords’ featuring artwork from Denys Cowan’s ‘Contest of Champions #1’ are the first three albums to be getting the comic book treatment. Each album will be available as a double color vinyl Variant Collector’s Edition and a deluxe edition that also includes the original comic book and a 3D lenticular print of the cover limited to 3,000 copies each.
Comic book art has had a place on album covers for decades. And it hasn’t been for just hip-hop albums either. Hip-hop and rock artists have booth seen fit to go for a more animated style when it came to packaging their creative visions. And some of them have even commissioned work from some of the most important comic artists in the field.
Vinyl Bay 777, Long Island’s music outlet, is taking a look at some music’s most iconic album covers drawn by some of comics’ most iconic artists. Here are five covers with some serious talent behind them.
1. Big Brother and the Holding Company, ‘Cheap Thrills’: Big Brother and the Holding Company’s ‘Cheap Thrills’ has one of the most recognizable album covers of the 1960s. It was drawn by underground artist and noted music lover R. Crumb (known best for his controversial character Fritz the Cat) at Janis Joplin’s request. In an interview with the album’s art director John Berg, it was said that Crumb did not want to be paid for the work because he didn’t want “Columbia’s filthy lucre.”
2. GZA, “Liquid Swords”: For his second solo album, Wu-Tang’s GZA enlisted the drawing prowess of fellow New Yorker Denys Cowan for its cover art and videos. By the time of the album’s release in 1995, Cowan had already made a name for himself in both comics and music, having drawn for both DC and Marvel, as well as collaborating on the one-time Prince comic book in 1991. As stated above, Cowan will be revisiting this album cover for the new Marvel / Universal deal.
3. Joe Satriani, ‘Surfing With The Alien’: The only one of these albums to feature an actual superhero on the cover, Joe Satriani decided to put a drawing of Marvel’s Silver Surfer on the cover of his iconic second album, ‘Surfing With The Alien.’ The character was originally created by the legendary Jack Kirby, though the picture on the cover was taken from 1982’s Silver Surfer #1, drawn by John Byrne. Byrne has been a prolific creator in his own right, having drawn many of Marvel’s most beloved characters, including the X-Men and Fantastic Four.
4. Iggy Pop, ‘Brick by Brick’: For the cover of Iggy Pop’s 1990 album ‘Brick by Brick,’ Virgin Records decided to reach out to artist Charles Burns. Burns had been known by then for his more macabre comics, based somewhere between horror and sci-fi, having been published in Art Spiegelman’s ‘Raw’ magazine and Sub Pop’s fanzine, as well as commissioned work for the likes of Time and the Village Voice and his own series of graphic novels.
5. Korn, ‘Follow the Leader’: When Korn released their 1998 album, ‘Follow the Leader,’ the artwork for the album became very associated with the band at the time. Not only was it the album cover, but it also ended up becoming the story in both breakout album single “Freak on a Leash” and the first single from their next album “Falling Away from Me.” The work was created by Greg Capullo, who was a comic artist with Marvel in the 1990s and has recently worked with DC drawing Batman.
It is not unusual for musicians to use comic book art for their album covers. Musicians in both rock and hip-hop have done so, some collaborating with some pretty prolific artists. Marvel and Universal’s Hip-Hop Variant reboot will be attempting to make the connection even more clear by taking iconic covers and reimagining them with iconic characters drawn by Marvel’s best artists. The result is sure to be something special.