SCREW #754, art by Tim Johnson

SCREW #754, art by Tim Johnson, 

dated January 7, 1983

SCREW #401, cover art by ironmountain

SCREW #401, cover art by ironmountain, 

dated November 8, 1976

Five SCREW Covers by Sophie Cossette!

July 8, 1996

December 9, 1996

July 28, 1997

January 26, 1998

August 30, 1999

Toronto-based cartoonist Sophie Cossette was kind enough to send me a care package stuffed with her excellent SCREW covers a few months back, and I'm only just getting around to posting them now. How lame is that? 

These beautifully-drawn covers all date from the mid-to-late 1990s, and if there's a common theme, I'd say it's lovely ladies doing nasty things with shellfish, (ten extra points for the severed head of Ron Jeremy!).

Be sure to pick up Sophie's recent book SINEMANIA here!

Will this be my final Goldstein? Cover art for XPOSE Magazine, 2/7/14

Will this be my final Goldstein? 

Cover art for XPOSE Magazine, 2/7/14, art direction by Kevin Hein.

SCREW #1,370, cover art by Scott Cunningham

Drawn when TV series "The X Files" was at the apex of its popularity, UFO afficionado Scott Cunningham shows us what agents Mulder & Scully get up to in their off hours. 

Issue dated June 5, 1995

FARE THEE WELL, SMUT PEDDLER: Al Goldstein RIP (1936-2013)

Al Goldstein has taken the elevator to the big edit meeting in the sky. 

I'll leave the obit-writing to the professionals.

You'll find those here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/nyregion/al-goldstein-pioneering-pornographer-dies-at-77.html?pagewanted=all

And here: http://observer.com/2013/12/al-goldstein-founder-of-screw-magazine-has-died/

All I have to add is this: Some people rear up in horror at the sight of pornography, and there's not much to be done about that. When considering porn, I think it's important to keep this in mind: some of our greatest artists and writers, (along with countless hacks) have turned to porn in the interest of scraping together a living. What they may have been surprised to discover in porn, (along with a modest paycheck) was artistic freedom. And THAT'S what I owe Al Goldstein.

For the last time: AL GOLDSTEIN IS NOT DEAD.

12/16/13: Confusion erupted early this morning when readers of magician Penn Jillette's Twitter feed read the following: "I'm in NYC. Today I visited my hero and friend Al Goldstein as he dies in the hospital, 

and tomorrow night I celebrate Lou Reed's Life. NYC"

Some readers, (including websites The RawStory.com and RealPornWikiLeaks) took this as a death announcement, which prompted Jillette to issue the following correction: "My buddy and hero, Al Goldstein is NOT dead.  He is unresponsive and not doing well, but he is alive. Try to stop the rumors. Thanks."

I now have a picture in my head left over from my old St Vincent's Hospital paper route: a type of patient the hospital personnel call a "gomer." These are bedridden old guys, mouths generally hanging slack, hovering unconscious in the twilight zone between life and death. They never bought any newspapers. Sobering and saddening to imagine one of humanity's most vociferous specimens reduced to this state. Think about it 

while you watch some vintage Midnight Blue clips: http://www.youtube.com/user/MBVids

(art by yours truly for the cover of SCREW #1,804, December 2006, art direction by Kevin Hein)

SCREW #398, cover art by Wallace Wood

Recently, collector Thomas Stein told me that he'd acquired an issue of SCREW from the mid 70s with cover art by Wally Wood. I started salivating as soon as he described the drawing to me, since this was clearly a Wood cover I hadn't seen before. Tom was kind enough to pay me a visit and let me pull a scan of the cover, which I am now happy to share with all you lovable SCREW Cover Art blog readers. It's SCREW #398, dated October18th, 1976.

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

SCREW #1,143: Cover art by Sabina Van der Linden

This issue is dated January 28, 1991. I know next to nothing about Sabina Van der Linden, but this cover has always stood out in my memory as one of the strongest 1990s-era SCREW covers I've seen. Any additional info on this artist would be greatly appreciated by your humble archivist! Beaucoup thanks go out to SCREW alum Ken Pastore for sending me this cover, 

(plus a few others that I'll post soon).