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Groovalicious Peter Max fashions from 1970
07.01.2015
02:20 pm
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Of all the designers in the world, probably none are as exclusively associated with the late 1960s and early 1970s as Peter Max. His symmetrical, kaleidoscopic and highly colorful “Art Nouveau had a baby with Haight-Ashbury” approach was perfectly suited for the days of The Dick Cavett Show and Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Alas, trendiness giveth, and trendiness taketh away—while he has never really stopped working, his work will never not be associated with that era.

I stumbled onto this fantastic spread of Peter Max clothing that appeared in Seventeen magazine in April 1970, and they kind of blew my mind. I’m assuming that fashion-conscious people are aware of these already, but I had never seen them before. I have so many questions—were these clothes actually popular? Do they pop up in thrift stores ever, or are they just too expensive for that? Does anyone wear them today? Pics please!

You can click on any of the full-page spreads in this post to get a much closer view—trust me, it’s worth it.
 

 

 
More Max after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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07.01.2015
02:20 pm
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Spend the night in a Cramps-themed trailer in the Mojave Desert
06.26.2015
11:04 am
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There’s a motel in Joshua Tree called Hicksville Trailer Palace, and it’s one of those Southern California attractions that makes me wish I had the late Huell Howser‘s job, if not his permanent expression of incredulity. I can almost hear Huell’s voice rising in astonishment as I review the rooms: a gypsy wagon that was used in Big Top Pee-Wee, an Airstream done up like a 70s bachelor pad, a frontier-type trailer with a wooden front porch, and a zombie-themed cabin, among others. There are amenities, too: a saltwater pool, miniature golf, a teepee, a recording studio, a film and video editing room, and something called the “Corn Hole” about which I am afraid to ask.
 

 
What really piques my interest in Hicksville, though, is its homage to the Cramps. “The Lux” is decked out in rockabilly/tiki/horror style, and while “tasteful” definitely isn’t the word I’m looking for, it looks like the designer knew what he or she was doing. I have a feeling that if they let me spend just one night in this place, which has a diner’s booth and on-table jukebox, a black and white TV that only shows horror movies, and a few attractive Cramps posters, I might start to talk loudly about squatter’s rights down at the Corn Hole.
 

 
Below, in a clip from MTV’s Extreme Cribs (ick), the owner of Hicksville Trailer Palace gives you a tour of the Lux at 1:16.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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06.26.2015
11:04 am
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Book designs for beautiful minds
06.26.2015
10:53 am
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My introduction to political theory and history came through Pelican Books—the non-fiction offshoot of Penguin Books. Pelicans were the high-end, academic books that brought bold, intellectual ideas to the mass public. The first Pelican imprint was George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, in which he the renowned author and playwright examined the theories of socialism and Marxism and the problems of capitalism. There then followed an impressive array of texts on art, architecture, psychology, economics and philosophy by writers as diverse as A. J. Ayer, E. P. Thomson and Jacob Bronowski. These paperbacks were mass-produced and sold at a price claimed to be lower than a packet of cigarettes. Allen Lane, who founded Penguin Books, believed there was “a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price.” He staked his money and reputation on it. Thankfully he was right—the vast reading public did want to read intelligent books and Penguins and Pelicans sold in the thousands.

There was a color coding to Penguin books—orange for fiction, olive green for modern literature, black (originally white) for classics and blue for non-fiction. A reader’s taste in books was easily identified by the uniformly colored blocks filling their shelves. While Penguins had generally illustrative covers to a book’s story, Pelicans by the 1960s had a uniformity of design that made the brand instantly recognizable—ranging from abstracts inspired by Op Art to fashionably stylized photographs. The peak of popularity for Pelicans was in the 1960s and early 1970s, when there seemed to be a Pelican title for nearly every imaginable topic—many of which later became the source material for Richard Littler at Scarfolk Council.

Penguin stopped publishing Pelican Books around the mid-1980s, though last year, the imprint was revitalized with a selection of new books and some texts available online. This small collection of vintage covers has been culled from various sites chosen mainly on the basis of being Pelicans I have read in my youth (Anarchism, Drugs, The Young Offender, Self and Others) or covers well-remembered because of their style and originality.
 
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More vintage designs for classic Pelican Books, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.26.2015
10:53 am
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Can you identify these pixelated versions of famous works of art?
06.23.2015
11:59 am
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Alexis Poles’ pixelated version of René Magritte’s 1964 painting ‘The Son of Man.’ 
 
If you have ever fancied hanging a great work of art on your wall but thought a mass produced copy too tacky, then these pixelated prints by Alexis Poles might just be the answer.

Using famous paintings as his starting point, Alexis has produced his own pixelated masterpieces—from Leonardo’s well-kent face of “Mona Lisa” to Andy Warhol’s “Chairman Mao” and Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss.” I find these pixelated masterpieces rather appealing—in part because of the original source material but also because of the way in which each picture have been rendered into beautiful cubes of color.

Poles is a graphic design student at Central Saint Martins, London, and his images are all available for purchase via his site Pixology. Each image would be printed on 160gr matt inkjet thermal wax paper and is available in any size.
 
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Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ (1893).
 
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Unmistakeable: Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘La Gioconda or Mona Lisa’ circa 1503-06.
 
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Another recognizable face: Andy Warhol’s ‘Chairman Mao’ (1972).
 
More pixel perfection, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.23.2015
11:59 am
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The Art of the Sleeve: Barney Bubbles’ beautiful record designs
06.18.2015
06:00 pm
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Barney Bubbles—photo-booth portrait.
 
Downloads don’t make it, nor do CDs—yon footery wee things that look more like drinks coasters or beer mats than containers for works of great music. CDs are too brittle—they easily crack—and can often be hell when trying to remove the inner notes without crease or tear. Only vinyl counts. Only vinyl gives the user the double pleasure of quality sound and quality design work to peruse.

When The Beatles started putting thought into the packaging of their albums—hiring artists like Klaus Voorman (Revolver), Peter Blake (Sgt. Pepper’s…) and Richard Hamilton (White Album)—the record sleeve became more than just a contents label. It allowed artists and designers to produce covers that would not only sell the music but become their own artwork. Among the designers who made a career out of record design, my own favorite (and arguably the greatest) was Barney Bubbles.

Born Colin Fulcher in 1942, Bubbles graduated from the Twickenham College of Technology, in London, before learning his craft as a graphic designer working with the likes of Michael Tucker + Associates and the Conran Group, before setting up the art group A1 Good Guyz with like-minded friends David Wills and Roy Burge in 1965. The trio organized various happenings and light shows across London before Bubbles started producing design work for Oz magazine in 1968.

By 1969, Bubbles had set up his own graphic studio Teenburger Designs on Portobello Road, where he began his highly successful design career. Over the next fourteen years, Bubbles produced memorable, eye-catching and popular record designs for Hawkwind, Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, The Damned, Lene Lovich and The Soft Toys. He was so talented and prolific he produced work under various different aliases—from Colin Fulcher to Big Jobs Ltd. But this was to do with modesty about his work rather than any fear over devaluing his brand name, as he explained to The Face magazine in 1981:

“...I don’t really like crediting myself on people’s albums—like you’ve got a Nick Lowe album, it’s NICK LOWE’S album not a Barney Bubbles’ album.”

After a year-long trip to Ireland—(“to recover from the end of a long term personal relationship”), Bubbles was appointed Art Director at Stiff Records by Jake Riviera (aka Andrew Jakeman) in 1977, where he supplied album, single and promotional designs for the label’s roster of artists—this was where he produced the incredible and stunning foldout sleeve for Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces LP—a work that became (quite literally) a text book for succeeding graphic designers to steal from. Working Stiff Records was liberating for Bubbles as he later said in an interview:

“It’s fun working with Jake, we’d just walk around the block—‘cause he was so busy—it would all be done in five minutes. I could actually do what I wanted to do without being told off by record companies that say ‘Fantastic but don’t you think…?’ and then they fuck it up!”

Bubbles said his approach to record design was “to wait, hear the music and meet the guys, and they tell you what they want and its up to you to deliver it.” During this time he also redesigned the N.M.E. logo and eventually branched out into a career as highly successful promo director making videos for The Specials (“Ghost Town,” “The Boiler”), Squeeze (“Is The Love?”), Elvis Costello (“Clubland”) and the Fun Boy Three (“The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum)”). He also started painting pictures an designing furniture. Just when Bubbles should have been getting the praise, recognition and superstardom his genius as a designer deserved, his career faltered and his designs started being rejected by his once loyal record labels and artists. Bubbles suffered from bi-polar disorder and the rejection devastated him, which led to his tragic suicide in November 1983.

Barney Bubbles was one of those rare artists and graphic designers whose work could make you go out and buy an album or a single—by an act you had never heard of before—just by the quality of his sleeve design. Thankfully, unlike book design, you can judge a record by a Barney Bubbles’ cover.
 
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Hawkwind ‘Search for Space’ (1971).
 
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Hawkwind ‘Doremi Fasol Latido’ (1972).
 
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Hawkwind ‘Space Ritual’ (1973).
 
More of Barney Bubbles’ work, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.18.2015
06:00 pm
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Wonderful chess set recreates the London skyline
06.16.2015
10:40 am
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An elegant and modern chess set has been created by London designers Ian Flood and Chris Prosser, with pieces crafted to represent the architecture of their home city.

In our London set Pawns are terraced houses, Big Ben is the Rook, with the London Eye playing the Knight. The Gherkin is cast as the Bishop, and the Shard lends its elegance and might to the role of the Queen. No other building than Canary Wharf would be better suited to play the King, and this piece stands at four and a half inches tall.

 

 
As you’ll see in the photos, the set is quite a stunner, and I wonder, where has this concept been? Given the symbolic value cities put on buildings, it seems like such a natural idea, but for the most part, niche chess sets currently seem to be marketed largely at geek culture—there are Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, LOTR, and Doctor Who sets. And Monopoly knockoffs that appeal to regional vanity by representing cities other than Atlantic City, NJ do quite well, so it’s sort of strange that the notion hasn’t been applied to chess. (That said, Monopoly is kind of way out of control with the licensed editions—Who’s buying the Seinfeld Monopoly board? WHO?)

This could be taken so far it’s ridiculous—what about sets that reflect sports rivalries? Manchester vs Liverpool? Pittsburgh vs Cleveland? (I’m envisioning a Cleveland set with crumbling, foreclosed houses for pawns, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for bishops, Dennis Kucinich for knights, so what if he’s not a building…) Per an article on If It’s Hip It’s Here, Prosser and Flood have New York and Paris sets in the works. If you like what you see here and would like a set of your city, the pair offer customization.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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06.16.2015
10:40 am
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The strange and lovely Surrealism of ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ in the ‘30s
06.10.2015
09:22 am
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This is the second installation of posts from the influential graphic artist Art Chantry’s forthcoming book Art Chantry Speaks: A Heretic’s History of 20th Century Graphic Design. The first is here. Chantry’s clear reverence for and deep knowledge of the history of his discipline, particularly in championing its seediest manifestations and its obsolete processes, informs a body of work which as much as anyone’s has been THE look of garage punk and grunge, and we’re grateful to Chantry and Feral House for letting us use his work in this form.—Ron Kretsch

Above is the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, September 15th, 1939. The cover is by A.M. Cassandre (1901-1968). I was lucky enough to stumble across a stash of these in a thrift store. I have the entire year bracketing from December 1938 all the way through January 1940. With the exception of three covers, they were all designed and illustrated by A.M. Cassandre.

Cassandre is considered maybe the high point of “high” Art Deco graphic design. His most famous poster is of a luxury liner barreling down on you, imaged from the bow of the ship. It’s a stunner. Virtually all of his posters—and he did many—are perfect. Each one is a highly prized collector’s item, a high mark in the history of poster design and graphic design. At his peak, the guy could do no wrong.
 

 
This is not to confuse A.M. Cassandre’s work with Art Deco exclusively. I doubt he considered his work “Art Deco” at all. He was one of a huge number—a legion—of graphic designers simply working in the hip style of the moment. Cassandre was not working in a vacuum; there were hundreds of competitors making similarly stunning posters while he was at work. Cassandre’s output was just a hair more astonishing, just a little “better” than the pack. Now, he’s virtually the only guy whose name we recognize from that era of poster design.

One of the big differences was that Cassandre was a Surrealist. The late 1930s was a period when Surrealism invaded American advertising. Surrealism leaked over from Europe initially through the art scene. But the real transfer of surreal dream imagery didn’t really cross the Atlantic until it hitchhiked on the back of the fashion industry. Euro-trash fashionistas of the ‘30s were avid hipsters, too. So they aped their ideas in a shallow copycat way into their fashionista thinking.

The ads in these magazines are a mind-blowing trip. Instead of real models, there was a proliferation of mannequins. And if that wasn’t disturbing enough, they are set in graphic dreamscapes, often with disturbing defacing elements like vegetables for heads and bananas for hands floating in swirling clouds and watch faces. All very cool, très chic!

Cassandre’s illustration style was part Dali, part Magritte and a little Max Ernst tossed in for shits and giggles. Cassandre’s imagery was so strange that his work looks psychedelic today (the chemical Surrealism of a later time). For an American magazine of this era, his work must have stood out like a big strange thumb.
 

 
Cassandre’s cover work for this period of Harper’s Bazaar was strange, to say the least. Instead of depicting actual fashions, he depicted the fantasy behind the fashion. He concentrated on the “dream of the idea” of what was being said and what the implication may be. It appealed to an emotional level of otherness and spin. The world on the verge of the second world war must have seemed like a bad nightmare unfolding. So Cassandre depicted floating eyeballs over an outline of France to imagine Paris fashion on the brink of catastrophe. Disturbing stuff—especially weird to see on the cover of a fashion magazine.

More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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06.10.2015
09:22 am
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‘The Black Power Tarot’: Beautifully illustrated tarot deck with Sun Ra, Richard Pryor and more!
06.09.2015
01:27 pm
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With the seal of approval from tarot maestro Alejandro Jodorowsky, comes these beautifully illustrated tarot cards by artist Michael Eaton and arranged and edited by King Khan. “The Black Power Tarot” is a version of the Tarot De Marseilles featuring black activists, public figures, comedians, musicians and important historic figures.

The cards are quite lovely if you ask me. If you look closely you’ll see Malcolm X, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and more.

There are 21 high quality prints that come in their own box. The set is £25.00 GBP (or around $39 USD).


 

 
More after the jump…
 

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Posted by Tara McGinley
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06.09.2015
01:27 pm
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Art Nouveau, ‘Laugh-In,’ and Hallmark Psychedelia—Art Chantry speaks
06.08.2015
11:25 am
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When I got my review copy of Art Chantry Speaks: A Heretic’s History of 20th Century Graphic Design in the mail from Feral House, I was mighty thrilled, as I’ve long admired Chantry’s work as a graphic artist. His clear reverence for and deep knowledge of the history of his discipline, particularly in championing its seediest manifestations and its obsolete processes, informs not just his own body of work, which as much as anyone’s was THE look of garage punk and grunge, but the work of the countless artists whom he’s inspired. In my past life as an Art Director in alt-weeklies, Chantry’s posters, record covers, and his work for the Seattle music magazine The Rocket, reproduced in the must-have Some People Can’t Surf, were frequent go-tos for inspiration when Photoshop just couldn’t do the job. Art Chantry Speaks is a collection of opinionated musings on a variety of design topics, and I was struck by a significant overlap between Chantry’s essays and DM’s coverage, so we decided that rather than simply review the book, we’d draft Chantry into service as a sort of guest blogger, republishing a few of his essays as DM posts. This is the first, and we’re grateful to Chantry and Feral House for letting us use his work in this form.—Ron Kretsch

In the mid- to late 1960s, the psychedelic underground revolution had already started to wane. It was a literal flash in the pan. All of the original pioneers had morphed into varying sorts of hacks and quacks, pushing new agendas as far-fetched as Buddhism, meditation, world domination, the Internet and flying saucers. Basically, the acid world was as unstable as the drug itself. Old doses of blotter have short half-lives and lose their potency fast. Vintage blotter acid collectors (yes, there is a huge market) probably couldn’t get high if they ate their entire collections. So goes the culture as well.

Whenever an underground counterculture (a rebellion against some established norm) erupts, there is usually a pushback from the mainstream. The first is “attack” (“Them dirty stinkin’ hippies should all be shot”) and then there is “assimilation” (“Gee, that paisley looks so cool on you!”).

Back in the Romantic rebellion of the late 1800s there emerged a back-to-nature movement that resulted in the Arts and Crafts revival and a rejection of established artistic norms. This rejection of the status quo happens with such periodic intensity, you could probably set a clock by it. During this phase, the reaction was heavily against the industrial revolution.

The initial process of saying “no” in this case was simply to return to handmade objects. This included an embrace of nature forms that was intellectually and emotionally antithetical to the Victorian stye. The immediate result was a rebirth of organic design and the Arts and Crafts movement. Some people literally returned to the woods to live like wild men (at least “wild” from their stilted perspective). Think Emerson, Thoreau or Gibbons.

Of course, industry—powered by the fast buck—saw opportunity and attempted to copycat the new romantic look. The result was Art Nouveau—a homespun manufactured style applied as decoration (just like Victorian motifs). The big difference was the curve. The Art Nouveau manufactured style almost appeared to have been grown on a machine like some kind of vining plant made of iron.

Soon, new archeological discoveries in Egypt and Mesoamerica resulted in another semi-rejection of the current design culture. The ancient “primitive man” geometric stylings as seen in King Tut’s tomb and the newly “discovered” cultures of the Mayans and the Aztecs resulted in quick adaptations to the Art Nouveau style (and so much easier to make with a machine). The result was Art Deco.

Art Nouveau started to look old-fashioned and Art Deco became the new rage of the machine society. Thoreau’s Walden Pond gave way to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The resulting mechanized World Wars did more to end that dream than any artistic rejection ever could.

Flash forward to the early post-WWII period in America. Displaced vets couldn’t fit into the new peacetime America. Uniformity was valued and loose cannons were depicted in popular media as Communist threats to the social order. The beatniks, biker culture, surfers, hot-rodders, truckers, abstract expressionist painters, gay underground, poets and bop musicians were the new Bohemia and they were derided as decadent trash. But the seeds of rejection they sowed took fruit in the early/mid ‘60s, just as the international modern stylings of the new space age and the “big idea” advertising culture combined with industrial ingenuity to create a new golden era of conformity and high style. “007, meet Helvetica Bold…”

The outsider subcultures were still there, developing their own aesthetic systems, not too dissimilar to the Romantics of the previous century. A new “back to nature” dream and a rebirth of the “community of man” emerged, albeit in scattered pockets. When the psychedelic culture emerged a real alternative to the exiting dominant culture became a possibility. It’s been said that with the hippies, “many puddles became a pond,” and soon many ponds became a lake, then an ocean. Then a tidal wave…
 

 

 
The high art style of this new “psychedelic” look was so heavily borrowed from early Art Nouveau that it was almost an embarrassment. Wes Wilson discovered typography by a famous Arts & Crafts typographer, Alfred Roller, and placed it on a waving baseline—and invented “psychedelic lettering”! Stanley Mouse began to ape Beardsley. Other artists copycatted Alphonse Mucha posters to a T. Rick Griffin followed the hand-drawn like work of scores of Blake imitators and shoved it through surfing and acid to arrive at his incredibly “organic” style.

The psychedelic style was an LSD-washed version of Art Nouveau. Even the communal movement owed its origins to Walden dreams. It was history repeating itself all over again, but this time in mind-blowing colors.

Industry was still there too, cranking out their version of what they thought they could sell. Whenever a new “culture” emerges and finds popular appeal to the young, the marketing monsters are right there ready to go with their mass-produced version of the same thing. But they never get it quite right. The very industrial design process removes the “natural” content and replaces it with uniform mediocrity. In this case, the fake psych look literally replaces the larger mainstream culture’s very idea of what Psychedelia was.

Along came “industrial psychedelia” or, as I prefer, “Hallmark psychedelia” (because Hallmark greeting cards tried so hard for so long to co-opt the style). It was all bright colors, swirling everything, cartoon characters, goofy humor and totally innocent fun. Basically, the exact opposite of the earnestness of the Hippie movement and its goals.
 

 
Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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06.08.2015
11:25 am
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East beats West: Sensational Japanese posters of popular 70s films
05.25.2015
12:28 pm
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Japanese movie posters of the sixties and seventies kick ass. They always seemed more exciting than their American or British counterparts, managing to take choice images and compose them like frames from a comic book. Even when the posters were just cut and paste jobs there always a sense of drama, as if you have joined the story at a key scene—explosions blossom, machine guns rip, heroes do battle.

This little mix of classy posters show how good graphic art can make average movies like Caged Heat, Serpico, Black Belt Jones and Dracula A.D. 1972 seem like masterpieces.
 
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More Japanese movie posters, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.25.2015
12:28 pm
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