Cover Art for SCREW #506, featuring cover artist Spain Rodriguez

Spain Rodriguez has been one of my all-time underground comix faves since I picked up my first ZAP Comix reprint in the very early 80s. Whether it's his iconic antihero Trashman, his femme fatale Big Bitch, his excellent historical pieces, or his autobiographical coming-of-age motorcycle gang tales, I'm always happy to sit down and spend some time with a Spain strip.

Besides being one of the founding fathers of Underground Comix, Spain was also standing in the delivery room when the East Village Other and similar 1960s hippie papers were born. As you may already know, that's the same grimy gene pool from which SCREW first crawled in 1968. I imagine that Spain began contributing art to SCREW pretty early in the paper's run, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there are many more Spain SCREW covers than are collected in my insufficient archive.

Here's a nice Spain SCREW cover from November 1978, featuring a subtle flash on a NYC subway car. Spain turned in some of the most stupefyingly complex color separations I've ever seen, but this one is fairly simple. It's a strong cover, one of many from Spain Rodriguez that I hope to post in the weeks to come.