Celebrating Rob Zombie, graphic artist, at sixty

Master of many arts, including graphic.

Editor's note: We don't get many offers to guest post here on The Silver Key, but here's a rare exception--my old Cimmerian and DMR Books collaborator Deuce Richardson. And he's chosen a subject who hails from a city about a 5 minute drive from my house. Enjoy! And thanks Deuce.

By Deuce Richardson

Rob Zombie turned sixty yesterday. Where have the years gone?

I don't wish to discuss Rob's musical legacy (some excellent stuff, but very uneven), nor his cinematic work (I haven't seen enough to have an opinion). No, I'd like to examine his creative endeavors in the realm of graphic arts. 

Let's start at the start. Robert Bartleh Cummings--the Man Who Would Be Zombie--was born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in the heart of Lovecraft Country, to a couple of carnies. That's correct; his parents worked for a carnival. That ended in 1977 when a violent riot broke out at the carnival, with Mr. and Mrs. Cummings deciding to find a better line of work and a better environment for their children.

Rob lived most of his childhood and teen years in the 1970s. It was a decade of grooviness, decadence, schlock and pop culture masterpieces. His young brain soaked all of it up like a sponge. Musically, he gravitated to theatrical bands like Alice Cooper and KISS. Cinematically, Italian horror movies and the oeuvre of John Carpenter. 

When it came to the graphic arts, the Seventies were also bursting at the seams with groovy energy. There was Frazetta, of course, but Marvel comics and the horror mags over at Warren as well. In addition there was plenty of gonzo art in ads aimed at kids. I vividly remember seeing such in comics ads from that period. This was the era of Jack Kirby, Big Daddy Roth, Basil Gogos and Jim Phillips. Rob has name-checked all of them as artists he admires. I don't see much of Gogos in his own work, but plenty of the others, plus a little bit of Bernie Wrightson. 

So, there was Robert Cummings growing up in the white trash section of Haverhill--not that far, incidentally, from an even younger Brian Murphy---dreaming lurid Technicolor dreams and working on his art skills. Upon his graduation in 1983, Rob packed up for New York City and enrolled at Parsons School of Design. Almost immediately, he formed White Zombie with Sean Yseult. 

White Zombie released Soul-Crusher in 1987 and Make Them Die Slowly in 1989, along with a couple of EPs. Rob's art was featured on all of those, as well as on playbills and promotional materials. Incidentally, 1989 was when he adopted the "Rob Zombie" moniker.

Below is the original artwork from the 1985 Gods on Voodoo Moon EP, which came out before Soul-Crusher.

Rob seems to have really come into his own, art-wise, in the run-up to the release of 1992's La Sexorcisto. White Zombie fans would see a flood of art from Rob Zombie for the next few years. Below is the inside artwork for La Sexorcisto. 

Rob not only did art for the band. In March of 1993, he was invited onto Headbangers Ball. He proceeded to paint, in real time, various gonzo macabre art on the divider screens of the set. None of it was Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, but it was certainly cool. A great demonstration of Rob Zombie's raw talent.

Rob Zombie on Headbangers Ball - March 6, 1993

Mike Judge played a big part in breaking White Zombie via Beavis and Butt-Head. He took it one step further, bringing on Rob Zombie to come up with the art for the "Peyote Sequence" in 1996' Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. It was a match made in White Trash Valhalla. As Rob said in an 2018 interview:

“The best time I ever had was, I was driving around Austin with Mike Judge, and he was trying to explain something to me, and he was doing it in [Beavis and Butt-Head’s] voices. He’d do one, then do the other, just back and forth. Really bizarre to watch the two different voices come out of him,” Zombie chuckles. “It’s like Billy Bob Thornton doing the Sling Blade voice. You just can’t believe that’s the same person, that this is happening.”

 “I had the script, and it just said, ‘Beavis hallucinates the greatest music video of all time.’ That was all it said. And then he let me just come up with whatever crazy stuff I came up with. I was on tour, and I was drawing all these designs, and I kept faxing them to Mike Judge at that time. And that was the sequence. … It was just crazy stuff, like monsters playing guitars, TVs morphing into creatures; I don’t know, it was just supposed to be some trippy LSD thing. … Seemed to work out OK!”

It certainly did. I remember sitting in the theater and seeing that sequence and telling my bud, "Rob Zombie did that. I guarantee it!"

Rob Zombie's art output slacked off sharply after that. I have no idea why. It coincided with the break-up of White Zombie. History seems to indicate that we usually get about five to ten years of top-drawer work from most artists. I'm just glad to have been there when Rob was cranking out his cool retro-groovy-shock art.

Below, you can find a gallery of Rob's work.