At DM we are yuuuuuge fans of the work of the Spanish illustrator Joan Cornellà, whose delightfully colorful and macabre creations have been warping our brains for a good many years now.

Cornellà‘s comics are invariably deceptive: they almost always appear to be targeted at children, quite similar to a Technicolor version of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, but the content of the panels is cheerfully replete with grisly and dark occurrences such as beheadings, bestiality, depravity, and the like. Our own Amber Frost took a look at Cornellà‘s marvelous work last year.

In 2015 Fantagraphics published Mox Nox, a collection of comics by Cornellà, and they have a Cornellà title called Zonzo that is slated for early 2017.

A few days ago Wilco announced that a new album called Schmilco (a pretty clear shout-out it would appear to Harry Nilsson’s 1971 album Schmilsson) will be released this September. It turns out that Wilco has had the good taste to outsource the duty of album art to Cornellà, as you can see above. I undertook some rudimentary online searches and was unable to find any previous album art by Cornellà. Lucy Bourton of It’s Nice That asserted that Schmilco represents “the first time Joan’s work has been used on an album cover.”

Here’s a video Cornellà did last year for an animation project on Kickstarter that very much shares the comedic sensibility of Cornellà‘s strips (make sure you watch through to the very end).

 
via It’s Nice That
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
The dark, incredibly f*cked up comics of Joan Cornellà