The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora — upcoming book

I’m waiting to get my copy of The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora, a new book coming out from Fantagraphics. Flora was a record album cover illustrator in the 1940s and 1950s. I discovered him about 15 years ago when I bought a Benny Goodman record with a Flora cover at a garage sale for $(removed) Finding this illustration reconfigured my brain.

Here’s a good description of Flora’s style (from the back cover of the book):

Vintage music buffs have long been bedazzled by bizarre, cartoonish album covers tagged with the signature “Flora.” In the 1940s and ’50s, James (Jim) Flora designed dozens of diabolic cover illustrations, many for Columbia and RCA Victor jazz artists. His designs pulsed with angular hepcats bearing funnel-tapered noses and shark-fin chins, who fingered cockeyed pianos and honked lollipop-hued horns. In the background, geometric doo-dads floated willy-nilly like a kindergarten toy room gone anti-gravitational. He wreaked havoc with the laws of physics, conjuring up flying musicians, levitating instruments, and wobbly dimensional perspectives. Yet Flora’s wondrous, childlike exuberance was subverted by a sinister tinge of the grotesque. As Flora confessed in a 1998 interview, “I got away with murder, didn’t I?”

There’s a nice Flora art gallery online, which is maintained by Irwin Chusid, who compiled the book for Fantagraphics.

Fantagraphics also published a book by one of my other main influences, Gene Deitch, called The Cat on a Hot Thin Groove. He did the covers for a jazz fanzine in the 1940s, called The Record Changer. In the ’60s, Deitch was the art director for UPA, the cartoon studio that produced Gerald McBoingBoing. ABout 10 years ago I had the pleasure of visiting Deitch in his San Francisco home (He lives most of the year in Prague). He drew a great picture of his jazz character, The Cat, for me and presented it to me. I interviewed him for the print edition of bOING bOING, but I never got around to transcribing the tape. I hope I still have it.

One of my other big influences, Disney Artist Mary Blair, got her own book this year too! (Illustrator Bob Staake has a couple of pages with Blair’s art.)

Now, all I need to round out my library of illustrator-gods are books about the work of Tom Oreb and Ed Benedict.