Nine SCREW covers by SPAIN RODRIGUEZ, (1940 - 2012)

Spain Rodriguez drew many wonderful covers for SCREW Magazine during his long cartooning career. Here are the nine I have in my collection, but I suspect there are lots more. If anyone has a SCREW cover by Spain that's not posted here, I'd love to see it.

Here are two paragraphs I wrote in remembrance of Spain for Tim Hodler at The Comics Journal:

By 1982, I’d outgrown the superhero comics I’d read steadily through my teen years. To fill the void, I was buying all the undergrounds I could find at various long-lost quirky NYC comic shops like Soho Zat. As is typical, Crumb was the gateway drug. Fritz the Cat led quickly to Zap Comix, and while I loved nearly everything I saw between Zap‘s covers, I was particularly drawn to Spain Rodriguez’s bold pages that looked as if they’d been drawn by Wally Wood on four hits of blotter acid. Spain was sketching a world I desperately wanted to visit: brutally violent, brazenly sexy and relentlessly hip. Spain’s vision is a paranoid sci-fi fever dream where insidious corruption trickles down from the hidden seats of power, while leather-clad culture warriors fight that power in the name of the people’s revolution. Good stuff.

Roughly a decade and a half later, in the midst of a notorious legal jam, I found myself reaching out to many “big name” cartoonists in the hope that I’d score contributions for my benefit book. I was struck by the generosity of Spiegelman, Crumb, Robt. Williams, Kim Deitch, and some of the other underground greats, but again, I was especially touched by the kind spirit of Spain Rodriguez. During a visit to San Francisco, Spain graciously spent most of a morning driving me around town in his vintage auto, sharing stories about the city he loved, his underground comix collaborators, and other anecdotes from the kind of life that would make any sane person green with envy. From the Road Vultures to the ’68 Democratic Convention and the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater, this was a man who’d been given a front row seat to the spectacle of mid-Twentieth Century America in transformation. Luckily for his readers, Spain had both the intelligence to understand what he was looking at, and the skill to share his insights with us in ways that were both moving and beautiful. In this instance at least, the cliched caveat that one should never meet one’s heroes was entirely wrong.

  SCREW #1,115, dated July 16th, 1990

  SCREW #1,293, dated December 13th, 1993

  SCREW #1,327, dated August 8, 1994

  SCREW #1,346, dated December 19th, 1994

  SCREW #1,358, dated March 13th, 1995

  SCREW #1,469, dated April 28th, 1997

  SCREW #812, dated September 24th, 1984

SCREW #506, November 1978

 SCREW #875, dated December 9th, 1985

Cover Art for SCREW #1063, featuring cover artist Jim "Hak" Hopkins

By the early 1980s, the path that led cartoonists from Manhattan's School of Visual Arts to SCREW Magazine had been well-established. Kevin Hein, who in his SVA days assisted Art Spiegelman & Francoise Mouly at RAW, later sought full-time work in SCREW's art department, and eventually found himself sitting in the art director's chair. Many of Hein's SVA classmates sold art to SCREW, including Kaz, Drew Friedman, Peter Bagge, and a fellow named Jim Hopkins, who drew for SCREW under the pseudonym "HAK."

Jim Hopkins contributed many covers and comic strips to SCREW during Kevin Hein's tenure as art director. I've always considered Jim to be one of the most talented folks ever to grace the cover of the notorious smut tabloid. Issue #1063 features what might be the best of all the "HAK" covers, this one starring revolutionary stand-up comic Lenny Bruce. Sadly, I managed to save only the cover of #1063, but I believe this gorgeous drawing was accompanied by "Shpritz to Lenny," a touching three-page tribute strip which Jim was kind enough to allow me to reprint in my anthology LEGAL ACTION COMICS Vol. 1 in 2000.

A quick Google search has lead me to this blog, and this blog,
both of which feature what appears to be current work by Jim (no longer known as "HAK") Hopkins, now a veteran of the storyboard scene. From what I can see, Jim's stuff has gotten even more accomplished and beautiful than when I last saw it over a decade ago, (if that's possible).

SCREW #1063 is dated July 17, 1989. Scanning and color-correcting these old, moldering sheets of newsprint is always challenging, but doing justice to this drawing was especially tricky, given the subtlety of Hopkins' technique. My guess is that Jim started off with a B&W image drawn in either china marker or pastel. For his color seps, it appears that Jim did two overlays, ALSO in pastel or china marker, for his yellow and cyan plates. It's a lushly nuanced drawing that deserves better quality paper and a more sophisticated printing press than it got.