illustration

In 2004, Merle Becker quit her corporate television job at MTV to pursue a growing fascination with rock posters. Soon, she was traveling across the country interviewing artists such as Stanley Mouse, Art Chantry, and Tara McPherson. "My initial intent was to find out why so many artists are drawn to doing rock posters," says Becker. "I also wanted to tell a clear story of the history of the art form." The result is American Artifact, a documentary that has been making the festival rounds and premieres tonight in New York at the Royal Flush Festival.

The film chronicles the rise of American rock poster art, from the skeleton and roses posters created for the Grateful Dead and the birth of silk-screening to grunge and the off-kilter whimsy associated with contemporary bands. "It is my hope that this film causes people to see 'lowbrow' art in a different way," notes Becker, "as beautiful pieces of art that are also valid statements about the cultural changes that America has seen throughout the years."

Always a huge music fan, Becker was inspired to make American Artifact after encountering Paul Grushkin and Dennis King's coffee table tome Art of Modern Rock. "I was not only blown away by the artwork, but I was also surprised that nobody had done a film about its history and the current rock poster art movement," Becker tells us. "I really had no idea that modern rock posters were being done, and until that book, I thought that the '60s rock poster art had marked the end of that medium." She soon found her way to GigPosters.com, "and the rest is history."

Read on for more from our interview with Becker.

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Michael Cho recently completed what he describes as "a dream assignment": creating jacket artwork for the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Don DeLillo's White Noise, first published by Viking in 1985 with a minimalist white jacket designed by Neil Stuart. "I am a DeLillo fan," Cho told Ron Hogan of Galleycat, our bookish brother blog, "and White Noise was one of my favorite books when I was a teen....No joke—I was actually reading Libra when I got the call from Penguin." Cho, a Toronto-based illustrator and cartoonist, was chosen for the assignment by Penguin art director Paul Buckley, who consulted with DeLillo on the decision. "I'm impressed by how bold Michael is," noted Buckley. "He uses just a few colors and blocks everything off in a deceivingly simple way that screams confidence."

Cho's only restrictions in designing a jacket for the postmodern tale of an "airborne toxic event" were to leave room for the Penguin logos and a bar code box. "I'd never experienced that kind of freedom with a book jacket assignment before," explains Cho on his blog. "Usually, at least marketing factors partially determine how a book jacket will be illustrated, but in this case, I was asked to just follow my muse. Amazing." And so is the final product—a DeLillo-approved mix of colorful, comics-style panels and pull quotes that would make Jenny Holzer go weak in the knees—which is slated for a late December release. As for the type, Cho decided to turn down Buckley's offer of hand-lettering. "I felt that White Noise was too 'cool' a book for such a 'hot' approach as hand-lettered type."

Previously on UnBeige:

Since its last redesign more than a decade ago, the government-issued "Choking Victim" poster has adorned the walls of New York City restaurants with scenes of a faceless duo safely performing the Heimlich maneuver in a Constructivist swirl of step-by-step instructions on "how to dislodge food from a choking person." Brooklyn artist Alex Holden took it upon himself to freshen up the ubiquitous poster, softening the didactic graphics and primary colors with a comic strip-style take in a soothing blue and white palette. His reimagined "Choking Victim" poster contains all the same life-saving information but sets the choking scene at a beachside resort, where members of the upscale crowd (one collapsed, one standing and wearing a fedora) escape death among the palm trees and festive party lanterns. Holden's poster has already been adopted by a few more aesthetically astute restaurateurs, who find his version much easier to swallow. Here's a look at the full poster:

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(Photo: Kevin Van Aelst)

Sure, you enjoyed Erwin Olaf's images of abandoned kitchens and Rob Walker's eye-opening look at Latisse (hearing Brooke Shields say "inadequate or not enough lashes" makes us cringe so), but we think the real star of the most recent issue of The New York Times Magazine is Kevin Van Aelst's graphic accompaniment to The Medium, the mixed media column penned by Virginia Heffernan. In this week's installment, New Haven-based Van Aelst whipped up this photo to illustrate Heffernan's look at how fathers are adapting to the online world. It's Father Knows Best meets Magritte 2.0. Smokin'.

With the season three premiere of Mad Men only weeks away, AMC is rolling out a slew of online gewgaws (which we prefer to "social media-based viral marketing initiatives"). Along with the typical quizzes and e-cards is Mad Men Yourself, a just-launched site that allows user to create their own stylized '60s avatars (that's us, at left, going for a chic Betty Draper look that is very Michael Kors fall 2008) by choosing from an assortment of body shapes, facial features, hairstyles, and accessories—including a martini, a cigarette, and a doughnut, recalling a time when all three were acceptable to savor in the workplace. Drop your avatar into settings such as the Sterling Cooper offices, a picnic, or a pattern that looks ripped from the Draper family sofa. The illustrator behind the application's infinitely customizable characters is none other than Dyna Moe, who you may recall as the creator of Mad Men Illustrated, the delightful series of drawings inspired by scenes from the show and the New York-based illustrator and designer's own cache of period advertisements. "The show is famous for its meticulousness," she said recently. "And I try to reflect that in the simple cartoony way that I draw." Now go forth and Mad Men Yourself.

It was the Jean de Florette theme played on a warbling harmonica that sold us on Stella Artois, and the Belgian brewery continues to quench our thirst for memorable marketing. To spread the word about Stella Artois 4%, a new triple-filtered (read: lower alcohol) brew, London ad firm Mother looked to the French Riviera of the 1960s as it was immortalized au cinéma. Translation? Bond. James Bond. A website features a trio of film parodies, complete with faux movie posters, but the real stars of the campaign are the illustrations of Robert McGinnis, who created the original artwork for Bond films including Live And Let Die and The Man With The Golden Gun and came out of retirement to sketch for Stella. Creative Review's blog has McGinnis's preliminary drawings as well as the full line-up of finished posters, which feature a Bond-like character and his slinky female companion enjoying the good life in what appears to be St. Tropez. However, one commenter pointed out that the smooth, piano-playing character in one of the posters bears a striking resemblance to Adam Sandler.

Comic books and video games are going straight to hell—all nine circles of it. Beginning Thursday, Electronic Arts and DC Comics will preview their adaptations of The Divine Comedy at Comic-Con in San Diego. Both companies are hellbent on bringing the first infernal cantica of Dante's epic poem to a contemporary audience, one that would rather skip the 14,000 lines of verse and jump right into the vivid doom. EA's Visceral Games division is developing an elaborate video game version, Dante's Inferno, in which "a soldier...defies death and fights for love against impossible odds," picking a path through the afterlife with the help of a soul-reaping scythe, holy powers, and the ability to tame horrific creatures. For those who prefer to prowl the underworld on paper, DC Comics is at work on a comic book mini-series based on the Inferno. Illustrated by Diego Latorre (The Incredible Hulk) and written by Christos Gage (X-Men/Spider-Man), the comics go on sale this December, just in time to prime audiences for the 2010 launch of the game. Can't make it to Comic-Con? EA's website invites you to view a trailer for the game and "Explore Hell," where you can Twitter in Limbo.

(Photo: Wright)

Those up on their Kennedy lore will recall that the young Jacqueline Bouvier worked briefly as the Washington Times-Herald's "Inquiring Camera Girl," but did you know that she was also adept at capturing images with a pen and pencil? Wright recently auctioned eight ink sketches done by Jackie Kennedy (then the First Lady) in 1961, as she waited to be interviewed for Look Magazine. Following the interview, the drawings were gifted to the magazine's president and until last month remained in his family. Kennedy illustrated selected events during the political career of her husband, who she depicted with a certain Goofus and Gallant flair and a charming sheepishness that we associate with Robert McCloskey's Homer Price. Sold separately, the drawings fetched between $1,875 and $3,125, with the high price paid for a drawing of JFK asnooze in the bed of Connecticut Governor Abraham Ribicoff.

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Looking to convince some aesthetically astute youngsters to read the classics? Penguin can help. The publisher recruited one of our favorite graphic artists, Ruben Toledo, to create illustrations for the covers of a new trio of Penguin Classics, reports Galleycat senior editor Ron Hogan (via Nylon). In addition to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (at left), Toledo brought his signature à la mode elegance to The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Part of the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions line, the books will be published in late August, just in time to entice back-to-school shoppers.

Penguin has previously recruited the likes of Chris Ware, Seth, and Roz Chast to illustrate Deluxe Classics covers. One of our all-time favorites, despite (or perhaps because of) our vegetarian tendencies: Charles Burns's striking carcass cover for a 2006 edition of The Jungle, muckracker Upton Sinclair's slaughterhouse exposé.

For those who haven't had the pleasure of reading "Pearls Before Swine," we point you here. For those with link fatigue (or if you're "reading" this on your talking Kindle), we describe the popular comic strip as Itchy and Scratchy meets Garfield with a dollop of postmodern storytelling (see ya, fourth wall!). An inarticulate fraternity of crocodiles is also involved. Today Galleycat, our bookish brother blog, reports that "Pearls Before Swine" creator Stephan Pastis has begun talks with an unnamed studio to bring his syndicated strip to the silver screen in an animated feature.

Pastis, who we know from his blog has won at least one posture competition, also spoke with Galleycat about the work of assembling his eleventh comics collection, The Saturday Evening Pearls, out this month from Andrews McMeel. "It's a lot of work, because in addition to doing the covers, I write comments below many of the individual strips," he explained. "The comments involve what I may have liked/not liked about the strip, feedback I got from readers, mistakes, etc. The comments take a fair amount of time, but they seem to be readers' favorite part of the book." As for what's next in the world of comics in these days of dying newspapers, Pastis believes that "the future will involve getting animated in some capacity and distributed on the Internet."