I’ve made it pretty clear in the past that I have a great appreciation for visual artists, often demonstrated through both my Alternate Album Cover Art and these Please Make My Album Cover! posts. In fact, I do my all to straighten out my Instagram feed to stop recommending me scantily-clad women (I’m only flesh and blood) and recommend me more and more visual artists. Presently, my social media feeds are also becoming a welcome place for animators, and the Adventures of Ghostie stop-motion shorts in particular have been warming my heart most recently. If I see enough interesting animation accounts, I’ve got to start a new series of posts titled Please Make My Music Video. But for now, I’ll stick with still images.
If it’s your first time reading my site, I welcome you, and present the first two posts I made on this particular topic (see Part 1 and Part 2). Once again, here are some more illustrators that I’ve discovered through various sources that I think would create great album covers if given the opportunity (or further opportunity, if they have done so already).
David Schleinkofer
What Is He Known For?
Out of his extensive body of work (which can be sampled on his Flickr account), I first took note of him through his work on various Transformers-related projects. I didn’t receive much in terms brand-new Transformers toys as a kid, getting most of mine through yard sales and hand-me-downs. However, some years ago, I briefly owned a board game titled Transformers Adventure Game. The box art, depicting an epic battle between the Autobots and Decepticons that was illustrated by Schleinkofer, was a big reason I made the purchase.
I would have loved having this on a poster as a kid! Though I obtained the board game as an adult, it was still tempting enough to frame the game board for display because the back of it had the above image on it in its full glory (box dimensions dictated that only a portion of the art could fit on the front).
While this would be enough to make a name off of, Schleinkofer has contributed artwork to books from the Robotech franchise and to movie posters, such as this one from the 1983 cult horror film Sleepaway Camp.
Has He Done Album Covers Before?
I’m only currently seeing one album, Terminal 11’s Skyscraper on a Megayacht, but I’m willing to bet there are even more underground artists that have used his art, possibly without permission. I couldn’t even tell you if this one was authorized as it seems rather obscure and limited edition.
What Style Of Music?
If I were to hire him, I think I’d lean towards some sort of soundtrack or film score-type work. Aside from the Sleepaway Camp design, I see he’s also got some artwork for Battlestar Galactica and a massive crossover work combining the likes of D.C., Marvel, and Star Wars characters. I’m not saying the score to which his art would pair up with would need to be for operatic science-fiction or comic book character films. His work could be on the cover of a jazzy film noir soundtrack (think Johnny Staccato), showing a hard-boiled detective in the midst of a case. Not necessarily a plot involving aliens, such as in the following piece, but I’m no screenplay writer. He’s got plenty of paintings of nautical vessels and wartime air-crafts as well, so the makers of a future thriller in the realm of The Hunt for Red October or Dunkirk could use him to help sell their soundtrack.
Dick Perez, Vernon Wells, and Steve Cusano
Left to right: Perez, Wells, Cusano
What Are They Known For?
Each of these men are known for contributing their artwork for use on sports trading cards, and I find it fitting to group these gentlemen together.
Dick Perez was the first of these artists to make himself known to sports fans, where his art would be featured on Donruss basball cards in their Diamond Kings subsets, which would highlight the accomplishments of one player per team each season. His accomplishments made him the subject of a documentary titled The Diamond King. As a Toronto Blue Jays fan, I’m obligated to point out that when the Diamond Kings cards debuted in 1982, John Mayberry was the team’s representative in the set.
I became familiar with both Vernon Wells and Steve Cusano through their work on Upper Deck card checklists. Wells was a very busy man in the early days of Upper Deck, handling the bulk of the art for the inaugural editions of their baseball (1989), hockey (1990-91), and football (1991) sets. See below for his work from guys on the teams I cheer on, with Fred McGriff of the Blue Jays, Gary Leeman of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and Neal Anderson of the Chicago Bears.
You may also be familiar with Wells through his son. The junior Vernon Wells was a star outfielder for the Blue Jays for twelve of his fifteen years in the Majors. Athleticism runs in the family, as Wells Sr. played both baseball and football, with his skills in the latter resulting in training camp invites with the Kansas City Chiefs of the NFL and Calgary Stampeders of the CFL.
Cusano took over the hockey line for the 1991-92 set, with some of his art being on some of the first trading cards I ever owned. I’ll keep it Toronto and share his Dave Ellett design.
Have They Done Album Covers Before?
Not from what I’ve seen. However, Cusano’s Instagram page once highlighted a John Lennon illustration he did some time ago.
What Style Of Music?
The most natural application here would be for a solo artist of some kind to get himself or herself stylized in this way. I don’t think there’s any need to bog it down to a singular genre, but it would obviously make the most sense if they were a sports fan. Anybody from (Ravi) Coltrane to Common could theoretically be a fit with these artists.
Klaus Janson
What Is He Known For?
Klaus Janson is a highly-decorated comic book artist, having won several industry awards for his inking, pencilling, and colouring work. I know him best as one of the individuals responsible for breathing new life into two of my favourite Marvel Comics characters in Daredevil and The Punisher. It should be noted that Frank Miller wrote and pencilled much of the Daredevils in their collaborations, with Janson doing the inking, but he would handle more pencilling duties with the character as time went on. SyFy.com’s Artist Alley interview with Janson in 2019 gives further insight into this time period.
Shared artistic credits on comics can become tricky to decipher unless you look a bit closer. Flipping through my modestly-sized collection, I feel his covers for Daredevil #193 and The Punisher #4 are a great representation of Janson’s capabilities.
Is there anything else to add beyond that? How about working on Batman, most notably through another of his many Frank Miller collaborations as inker of The Dark Knight Returns? Janson has also done work on stories involving such infamous characters as Superman, Thor, Howard the Duck, Captain Marvel, Spider-Man, and… it would probably be easier to skim through his bibliography from this archived list because he’s probably touched on your favourite comic series or characters in some fashion.
Has He Done Album Covers Before?
He’s not as big a name to casual comic book or Marvel fans as Frank Miller (who himself has but a few select album cover credits under his belt), yet I’m somewhat surprised that I cannot find a single album cover that used one of Klaus’ illustrations. This could have been the case merely because his desires never took him in that direction, but in his prime years of activity perhaps, like many of the other previously-covered artists, he could have simply been too overworked.
This is just a thought of a total outsider to the professional art world, but why not pick up work in other avenues beyond comics? Maybe he was never asked, wanted to “stay in his lane”, or there were more defined boundaries in the greater art world that prevented him from taking on such a project. I’m just a selfish music lover here, but I would love to see what could be accomplished by him.
What Style Of Music?
Within the comic industry, you can be asked to touch upon just about anything, especially considering comics are not merely for superheroes. Your own band can be characters sketched into tiny graphic boxes, as evident from times where music has already crossed into the comic world (see my The Last Temptation post from a few months ago or my earlier exploration of Jethro Tull and King Diamond’s comics within their liner notes), or keep it limited to the cover. You could have more heroic-looking depictions of your band, sort of like Anthrax’s We’ve Come For You All cover by Alex Ross, or it could be something with a tad more grit. The genre I’ll leave up to your imagination yet again, but it’s possible that if you played a style of music that Janson took a personal interest in, that would sway him to take on your project.
Jim Warren
What Is He Known For?
From a mainstream standpoint, Jim Warren would be best known for his work with Disney, as declared rather extensively on his official website. I don’t want to attempt stoking the ire of that behemoth of a corporation by posting a sample photo on my site, so I’ll leave it to you to explore his Disney creations independently.
I fell into my knowledge of him in a different way. Yet again, my trading card interest made me aware of a set that highlights some of his work, Beyond Bizarre. I don’t actually own that set (you can view it in gallery form here), but I have the follow-up set titled More Beyond Bizarre. In that context, in part because the gallery for that particular set on TCDB.com is missing several cards as of now, I’ll use the cards below to serve as a view into his artistic abilities. The bottom-most image was apparently used on the cover of a Clive Barker novel.
Has He Done Album Covers Before?
I was completely unaware that I had a cover of his in an album from my collection, Defiance’s Beyond Recognition. I had naively assumed that this was an Ed Repka cover, but in my defense, Repka did do the cover for the band’s first album Product of Society. I have at least two other of his covers in my collection, a Billy Cobham / George Duke album I’ve possessed for even longer (“Live” On Tour In Europe), and the highly-disturbing image on the front of Alice Cooper’s Raise Your Fist and Yell. The back of the Raise Your Fist and Yell card in the More Beyond Bizzare set states “I’m glad (I) got to do a few of them before they became an extinct art form!”
Bob Seger’s Against the Wind is likely the most-popular album cover to host his art, and he also created covers for the likes of Marianne Faithful and The Sylvers.
What Style Of Music?
He has already shown that his work can cover a lot of ground, but I’m keeping my focus towards on where his more surreal works could fit. The progressive rock or psychedelic realms of music don’t appear to have been touched upon in Warren’s discography, but it would work so well for a painter with an extensive imagination. I’m think of ‘60s inspired work, like Robyn Hitchcock, the XTC secretive side-project The Dukes of Stratosphere, or their contemporary equivalents.
Tim Jacobus
What Is He Known For?
Like me, you’d probably know of Tim best through his cover art for the children’s horror novel series Goosebumps. The anticipation level when we would receive our Scholastic book orders flyers in elementary school, as well as our school’s book fairs, would be through the roof for checking out the latest Goosebumps book alone. R.L. Stine’s method of introducing kids to horror themes in his writing was a gateway for many to the Stephen Kings of the world, but being the age where we wouldn’t hesitate to judge a book by its cover, the artwork of Tim Jacobus was also a big pull.
Here are a few of my favourite covers I’ve seen of his that I distinctly remember from my childhood. I’m not sure exactly which of these books I owned, which ones my siblings had, and which we missed out on, but with monster depictions as menacing as these, there’s no wonder the book franchise ballooned into a legitimate merchandising staple of the ‘90s, with things to throw money at ranging from board games, hand puppets, lunchboxes, watches, birthday party supplies, rub-on tattoos, bed sheets, and (years down the line, as nostalgia demanded) a movie.
Forgetting about the album covers theme for a second, wouldn’t these all look great on tour t-shirts as well?
Has He Done Album Covers Before?
He has worked in a relatively limited capacity for albums, mostly to what appears to be books on tape, but he was thankfully chosen for continuing his work within the Goosebumps movie franchise (including the soundtrack art). Jacobus’ cover work has aided albums from Elements, Sewercide, Ravage, and The Undead.
If I can highlight just one of his album covers, Return of the Spectral Rider would not look out of place at all if the Goosebumps logo was affixed to it. The album title could easily work for a book too!
Ravage guitarist/producer Eli Firicano, as told to Bravewords.com, was the one who suggested they contact Tim since he was a big fan of the books growing up. I’m sure many other millennial-aged musicians would nod in approval, potentially imagining what a future artistic collaboration could look like.
What Style Of Music?
Heavy metal fits here like a hand in a glove, but why limit his work to just that? The jazz-funk stylings of Elements in particular shows he can branch out if given the outlet.
Rap and hip-hop can lean into horror and the dark aspects of the world, such as Ice-T’s covers for Home Invasion and The Iceberg. Folk music could also make use of political themes with a blend of horror because who in their right mind wouldn’t think the power that politicians wield can be a scary thing, no matter who you cast your vote for. Millennial and Gen-Z artists would be the ones most likely to be game for a team-up, so who could look to Jacobus? I don’t know. Joanna Newsom? She’s covered children’s songs as part of her live shows, so there’s some vague world-colliding there, though Jacobus might need to lighten the imagery somewhat.
I’m not terribly certain where else to go with it. Just like the books he’s best known for contributing to, use your imagination on where to take this. It could pull people towards styles of music they may not think of otherwise searching for.
Armchair Maestro 