Sex, Rock n Roll & Op. Illusions - Hardcover

Moscoso, Victor

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1560976578 ISBN 13: 9781560976578

Publisher: Fantagraphics Books, 2006

Synopsis

by Victor Moscoso & Various
Sex, Rock 'N' Roll, & Optical Illusions is Victor Moscoso's first major, career-spanning retrospective, from his earliest poster work in 1966 to his most recent graphic experimentation. Optical Illusions contains his best posters that advertised bands playing in San Francisco's famous dance ballrooms of the time - the Avalon, the Matrix, and the Fillmore - as well as many of his Zap Comix contributions, and his solo comix work, many in Moscoso's signature color. This wide-ranging career retrospective - Moscoso's famous technique employing "vibrating colors" that he pioneered in his posters is impeccably reproduced with as much fidelity to the original as modern printing can achieve, his black-and-white and full color comix work is collected here for the first time - is an intense, vibrant, and revelatory experience. Introductions by Steve Heller and Milton Glaser.

About this title

About the Author

Victor Moscoso is one of the defining stylists of the psychedelic culture of the 1960s, and one of the original Zap Comix artists (with R. Crumb, Robert Williams, Gilbert Shelton, Spain Rodriguez, S. Clay Wilson and Rick Griffin). He lives with his wife Gail in San Francisco, California.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The reason so many hippies burned out may not have been too many drugs but too many hours spent trying to read Victor Moscoso's posters for the first generation of psychedelic rock concerts in 1960s San Francisco. This oversize gallery of posters, splash pages for Zap Comix and Moscoso's own one-shot comic books, a few of the artist's comics "stories," and sketches acknowledges in its first sentence what those fry-brain longhairs should have understood before it was too late: "Moscoso's posters are as illegible now as they were in 1967." Illegible then, illegible now, illegible forever. But mind-blowing as only a thoroughly trained (Cooper Union, Yale) artist could make them. Flouting conventional color complementation, Moscoso juxtaposed electrically bright, pure colors to produce illusory vibratory effects. Married to swirling letter shapes and imagery borrowed from nineteenth-century experimental photography and cinematography, his color storms became the standard for all other psychedelic art. It helped that he was an ace draftsman, especially when he switched from posters to comics, but his extremely plastic visual imagination was and is his biggest asset. Few other artists of any period have produced work of similar formal fascination: Escher, Monet, and some upon whose masterpieces Moscoso plays variations--Krazy Kat creator George Herriman, Klimt, Piero della Francesca. Which doesn't automatically make his stuff great art. But oh man, like, wow. Ray Olson
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About this edition

• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1560976578
• ISBN 13: 9781560976578
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 144