Today Green Jello's first album in 15 years hit the stores and I got to create all of the artwork. Hey, look! Here it is!
Bill (aka Moronic Dicktator) and I wanted the cover to look on par side by side with the previous albums illustrated by the talented Kim O'Donnell (aka Sadistica). We think it's a pretty good fit. What do you think?
I wasn't able to add highlights and shadows like I had wanted to due to time restrictions. Each of their albums is also a comic book and each song tells part of the story or introduces the characters. I loved reading the comics and drawing the characters in my notebooks in school and would wonder what would happen next in the story. The last album, 333, came out in '94. I never coulda guessed that 15 years later I'd be the one drawing the next one. It was really fun to get to work with Bill on this. I was such a huge Green Jello fan back then. How could I not be? Animated music videos of modern retellings of fairy tales, songs about deranged cartoon breakfast cereal mascots going on homicidal rampages, and sentient fecal matter with a nasty temper. Seriously, a shitman! I thought that was the funniest damn thing when I was 13, and honestly, it still makes me laugh (hey, I'll admit that my mind is stuck on a juvenile gear). Here's an old drawing I made of the Green Jello logo (the Euck Ship) I found in one of my notebooks from middle school. If you look carefully, you can see Beavis on the other side. I really shoulda paid more attention in school.
This new album has some familiar faces to Jellowood and also introduces some new characters, which I got to design. New to the Jello roster is Spice Boy, The Rock 'N Roll Rabbi, Stabby the Clown, Geek Girl, and Ed the Magic (and profusely sweating) Dragon! There are also guest appearances by some of my very best pals, The Radioactive Chicken Heads and the abnormal Mike Odd (aka Goat Boy)
This new album picks up right where the last one left off, which make since it was actually recorded 15 years ago. At the end of 333, Karkus Supreme (the robot/man on the left side of the 333 cover above) had just eaten Shitman and was on a deadly rampage with the rest of the bad guys. The cover to the new album is supposed to be the next panel in the story. We see Karkus crashing through a Halloween party at the 3 Little Pigs mansion in the Hollywood Hills and kidnapping Cheri Tomato of The Radioactive Chicken Heads. The arm crashing through the wall and grabbing her is supposed to be a reference to the original King Kong. Pretty much everything on the cover and comic book inside are references/homages to our favorite movies and cartoons (Hey, what's a Green Jello album without a couple of lawsuits, right?) as well as references to previous Green Jello songs/characters/videos/stories for the real die-hard Jello fans (like Kemp and Sherm the Germ!). Oh, also, since Halloween was a bit of a theme on this album, that's why the Euck logo was changed to a jack-o-lantern on the cover. The story continues inside with an 8-page full color comic book. I'll post the first page and go into a bit more detail tomorrow.
The design for this was based heavily on Chinese and Russian propaganda posters. Those posters have such great design and graphic appeal! Most of the influence was on the Chinese side. Specifically, the Mao Zedong posters (which my good friend Liz is responsible for turning me onto!).
