Last year, we brought you the story of Brazilian artist Butcher Billy’s comic book superhero take on New Wave artists from the early ’80s. Rock legends like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Billy Idol and The Smiths all got the Marvel/DC treatment. Now, Butcher Billy has taken one of those very same post-punk icons, Robert Smith of The Cure, and given him his own series of images he’s named “Tales of the Smith.”
This time, Butcher Billy opts for a different comic book genre as the muse for his project. Smith is portrayed as a gothic creature of the night in a series of retro style horror comic covers, the twist here being that each of the horror comics in this series is named after a particular song by The Cure. Butcher Billy describes this series as such: “Kisses and scares. Hearts and skulls. Giggles and graves. Romance in the shadows. This frightening series of strange tales is a homage to the goth legend who truly taught us love and darkness.”
In addition to being named for Cure songs, some of the pieces in this series have homages to iconic horror movies of the past. The cover for “A Forest” is an homage to the poster for Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead film; “Killing an Arab” is an homage to a famous image from Evil Dead 2, with Smith wielding a guitar instead of Ash’s trademark chainsaw. Of course, “Friday I’m In Love” is a tribute to (what else?) Jason Vorhees in the Friday the 13th series.
Butcher Billy has also provided black and white versions of each of these images, as well as oversized “street art” versions. You can see those by clicking on this link, and you can see the complete original color versions of “Tales of the Smith” in our gallery below.
IMAGES: Butcher Billy
