Skull and roses

Alton Kelly, RIP.

From a story last year in commemoration of the "Summer of Love:"

Stanley [Mouse] and I had no idea what we were doing. But we went ahead and looked at American Indian stuff, Chinese stuff, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modern, Bauhaus, whatever. We were stunned by what we found and what we were able to do. We had free rein to just go graphically crazy. Where before that all advertising was pretty much just typeset with a photograph of something. The last time there was any really posters done that had any value done were the posters done for World War II. "Loose Lips Sink Ships." But that was good stuff. At least it was graphically there. I saw one that showed a P-38 fighter plane and down below you could see a Japanese city burning and bullets were flying and it says "Payoff for Pearl Harbor" with a big Cadillac emblem. There was some pretty wild stuff during that period. Then it went Madison Avenue and the man in the gray flannel suit where it just got kinda bleak.

The printers were so happy. They were printing this junk and we came in and asked them to do stuff that they had never done. They showed us tricks, so it was a give and take on printing. They were happy as could be over the whole idea of it. They weren't just printing a photograph of a thing that said Buy Your Latest Camera at the Kodak store and they show a picture of a camera. Hell we came in there and it was this kind of thing, like skull and roses, Zig Zag man, Howlin' Wolf and all these things. They just loved it. They couldn't wait for us to show up.

Some of their work.