These are off-the-charts cool.

Illustrator Tommy Bishop, the madman behind the weirdo children’s book Incredibly Strange ABCs recently introduced a killer set of die-cut vinyl stickers depicting legends from the early years of rock and roll in the style of the old Mani-Yack horror movie transfers.

Mani-Yack transfers were the first widely available commercial t-shirt iron-ons. Their monster designs were some of their most popular in the 1960s.
 

A sample of the classic 1960s Mani-Yack monster transfer style.
 
Bishop has two sticker sets available, each containing three images, of iconic rockers in the Mani-Yack monster illustration style. Set one contains Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. Set two contains Esquerita, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

I asked Bishop if he plans to do future sets and he indicated that an instrumental rocker set is in the works, likely to feature Link Wray and Dick Dale. He is also considering a James Brown set featuring three phases of Brown’s career:

[I thought about] pulling from time periods and nicknames like the Famous Flames era, Mr. Dynamite, Godfather of Soul or Hardest Working Man in Show Biz, or Soul Brother #1… something like that.

Bishop has also expressed interest in doing a classic country set as well.

The sticker sets are available for $5.00 each from his web store.
 

 

 

 

 
In 2010 and 2011 the English artist Neal Fox executed an utterly gorgeous series of stained-glass windows in imitation of the iconography of saints found in cathedrals all over Europe. The series included Johnny Cash, J.G. Ballard, Hunter S. Thompson, Albert Hofmann, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Serge Gainsbourg, Aleister Crowley, William S. Burroughs, Billie Holiday, and Francis Bacon.

Now, it’s perfectly possible that you will see these images and think, “Wow, those paintings in the stained-glass style are awesome.” So it’s important to emphasize that these are not paintings, Fox actually created the stained-glass windows themselves—in fact, he worked with traditional methods “at the renowned Franz Mayer of Munich manufacturer” in order to produce a dozen windows, each using leaded stained glass in a steel frame and standing 2.5 meters tall.

Put them all together in a room, as the Daniel Blau gallery in London did in 2011, and you have “an alternative church of alternative saints.” Here is what that room looked like:
 

 
The Daniel Blau show was called “Beware of the God.” Alongside the well-known provocateurs and trouble-makers like Crowley and Hawkins is a figure that might challenge even the most astute student of antiheroes, a man named John Watson. Far from the complacent invention of Arthur Conan Doyle, this John Watson is the artist’s grandfather, described by his loving grandson as a “hell raiser” and “a World War II bomber pilot, chat show host, writer and publisher, who in his post war years sought solace in Soho’s bohemian watering holes.”

Quoting the Daniel Blau exhibition notes:
 

As traditional church windows show the iconography of saints, through representations of events in their lives, instruments of martyrdom and iconic motifs, Fox plays with the symbolism of each character’s cult of personality; Albert Hoffman takes a psychedelic bicycle ride above the LSD molecule, J G Ballard dissects the world, surrounded by 20th Century imagery and the eroticism of the car crash, and Johnny Cash holds his inner demon in chains after a religious experience in Nickerjack cave.

 
You can order prints of some of these images for £150 each (about $214).
 

 

 
Many more after the jump…

 
In 1983 Serge Gainsbourg paid homage to Screaming Jay Hawkins on French TV by singing his praises and joining Mr. Hawkins in a down and dirty rendition of “Constipation Blues.”

The first couple minutes of the clip are a portion of the performance in a rarely seen high quality version followed by the performance in full in less than stellar looking form. But it all sounds good.

There’s not alot of artists who could shut Serge up but Screaming Jay does a pretty good job of it. The mad man of Paris may have met his match.