Stop me if you've heard this one before

Back in 2005 I was asked by the agency who then sold space on scarygoround.com (imagine such heights, an ad agency!) if I would like to swap a month's run of ads for a page in Los Bros Hernandez' legendary B&W indie comic Love & Rockets.

I jumped at the chance. Jaime Hernandez is one of my favourite cartoonists, and his brother Gilbert may have his knockers but it's hard to say he doesn't have a formidable body of work.

But this was 2005. What kind of "creative" was I going to use to fill a page of this mag? The ad had to be black and white, and all my work was in colour - back in those days it really fell apart without it.

So I did the only thing I could: I went through Domenic Priore's "Look Listen Vibrate Smile", a 1993 book which exhaustively collates all the magazine writing, advertising and editorial around the Beach Boys' then-unreleased Smile LP, until I found what I was looking for...

...then I just transcribed it almost exactly.

Of all the esoteric artistic decisions I have made in my career, this remains one of my favourites. I knew that this ad would look incongruous unless the reader knew exactly what they were looking at, which I reasoned would probably be a maximum of three people. In the twenty years since, I've met one person who saw it - possibly a decade plus later - and knew what it referenced. And I like to think of the person at Fantagraphics who laid out the book looking at it and going, "what is this shit?" Then, as now, I was incapable of playing the game.

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Footnote: in writing this post today, I looked up the original ad. It was actually in colour? Blew me mind. I still put this record on sometimes, the first song is three songs and it still thrills me.