Scorched Art: The Incendiary Aesthetic of Flame Rite Zippos

For almost a decade, the radical art group Flame Rite has been producing Zippo lighters featuring the work of prominent comic artists. These "miniature billboards" that normally display a corporate logo have been reinvented as witty pop-art confections. Charles Burns’s ominous Smoking Skull, Daniel Clowes’s creepy-comic Eightball, Big Daddy Roth’s wacky Rat Fink, the fabulous retroisms of Niagara’s All Girls Are Bad and Shag’s Ooguh Booguh — all these and more (130 total) are on lurid display. The book includes the work of more than 30 prominent artists including R. Crumb, Daniel Clowes, and Shag, exclusive, previously unpublished art from 20 artists in the Flame Rite lineup, and every "metal canvas" that Flame Rite Zippo produced, featuring rare and out-of-print models.

Founder of the noise rock label Amphetamine Reptile back when "indie" actually meant something, Hazelmyer was a Zippo collector who was tired of designs that were no more challenging than "your average greeting card." The famed lighters have been icons of smoker cool since the 1930s, and were first logo-ed 20 years later, but by the early '90s they had, in Hazelmyer's view, become staid. He thus "scoured the art underworld for all that was amazing and started slapping it on a Zippo"-drawing heavily on the burgeoning indie comics scene for talent. Under the name Flame Rite (after being sued as "Smoke King"), designs from Peter Bagge, Shepard Fairy (creator of the ubiquitous "Andre the Giant has a posse" tags) and R. Crumb appeared in the early years; altogether, Hazelmyer has gathered 35 artists from the last decade. The smooth page design has a 1950s-tinged, slickly lurid feel. Shades of blue, orange and yellow are the backdrop for each Zippo, annotated with the name of its artist and date of creation. No artist bios are included, but there is a bibliography of Web sites for each designer.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.