We were mesmerized the first time we saw Thomas Allen's deconstructed cover art: The Detroit native took pulp novels from the 1940s, sliced the characters away from each covers and photographed them, giving them dimension and morphing their bland, retro-kitschy cliche into something else entirely.
So we're psyched by Uncovered, a collection of Allen's images with a foreword by book jacket wunderkind Chip Kidd (who featured one of Allen's works on the cover of a James Ellroy novel).
Cowboys seem to spring out of shadows, Clark Kent types spar in 3-D and bullet-brassiered women rise menacingly from the paper -- you'll never look at a dime-store paperback the same way again.
written on Thursday Sep 6, 2007
pulp,
covers,
books.
