Tuesday, July 20, 2021

superhero / superantihero

Looking at the 4 Hero early EP The Head Hunter, with its back cover cartoon of the group as malformed beings grotesquely mutated owing to their experimentation with speeding up the bpm... 










It struck me they had one thing in common with The Groundhogs 















But there must be many other examples of musicians becoming comic-strip characters or animations. 

Well, there's the animated sequences in The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle - a ruse around the non-participation of Johnny Rotten in the movie, the virtual nonparticipation of Vicious, and lack of documentary footage of certain key episodes 



                                                            original cel for Rotten


And here's that whole cartoon sequence from tGRnRS 




another sequence involving Vicious and his mum (plus smack and incest) (not actually in the finished movie) seeded these images on the left of the Great Rock'n'Swindle gatefold




which in turn reappeared on the front cover of this single and its music press adverts













3 comments:

Jim said...

Two things that spring to mind immediately. Robert crumb’s cover for cheap thrills by big brother and the holding company, features the band and little pictures for each song. Kiss have to have been the band most heavily depicted, they have had various comic book series devoted to them along with all the other merchandising since 1977, it’s still going on in 2021! https://www.blabbermouth.net/news/kiss-returns-to-comics-in-new-series-from-dynamite/

SIMON REYNOLDS said...

good examples

i'm sure there are lots of others

like Jilted John's True Love Stories is a comic strip cover
https://www.discogs.com/Jilted-John-True-Love-Stories/release/749681

Sensational Alex Harvey Band had a few cartoon style front cover (Harvey a big comic-book fan)


mrcus said...

Funkenticity Vs the placebo syndrome came with a comic and poster originally and there was also a Prince comic book where he battled 'spooky electric'