The folks as Pavement Licker zine and Verdant Brewing have just announced a packaging collaboration — a limited set of beer cans featuring artwork taken from the zine’s archives. The really cool bit is that one of the cans features a piece I did for Pavement Licker #9 — a composition of clip art and Letraset typesetting I tinkered with for Pink Mince #9 — Punk Mince — but never used.
The cans (all of them, not just mine) look great, but photos make it hard to see the full image that wraps around the can. Here is my “Punk as fuck” art, as shown in Pavement Licker in all its glory:
In true zine-like cut-and-paste spirit, though, the pieces each have a background of their own.
The typesetting was done with Letraset, one of the many bits that I put together to give Pink Mince #9 an appropriate punk tone.
When James-Lee Duffy of Pavement Licker asked me to contribute something for their zine, I thought it would be appropriate to something using some Futura, since James-Lee and I first met to have a chat about that typeface and its history. The “punk as FUCK” setting had the right tone for his zine, but I worried a bit about my cheeky use of Sluggo to go with it. Instead, I grabbed the cheerleader I used for another page in the issue, so Pavement Licker could showcase an illustration all its own.
The Letraset settings were new bits I made for Pink Mince, but that cheerleader had a history that goes way back, so it’s especially satisfying to see her reappear in another context today.
I first found her around 1991 in a book of clip art in the yearbook office at Boston University. Jostens, the company that helped BU publish its yearbook (which I designed for two years), provided all kinds of material like that to help schools fill out their books, but we had them all sitting in a drawer around the office.