Ryan Nelson wasn’t into comics as a kid, and he never finished art school – but it’s hard to tell from looking at his prolific work with punk rock fliers and album covers.
Nelson, a Washington, D.C.-based artist and musician, spoke at ETSU on Oct. 5 about comic art, flier art, punk rock and the art that influenced his life. Currently working for Discord Records in D.C., Nelson is also a former member of The Most Secret Method and, more recently, Beauty Pill.
Mainly, the fliers Nelson has produced are for The Most Secret Method, and for the most part they are all hand drawn images and hand drawn text. Nelson said he did experiment a few times with cut-and-paste printed text, usually with disastrous results. The artwork on the fliers is mostly black and white, pen and ink comic-inspired images.
“If you are cartooning, a lot of people I meet now don’t use brushes,” Nelson said, which are part of the tradition of cartooning.
Nelson creates his images on Bristol board, which has a fine tooth to the page, and Winsor & Newton India ink with a sable brush. Brushes, he said, give depth and gloss to an image that just cannot be achieved with a pen.
Comics, Nelson said, weren’t a part of his life until he was a sophomore in high school. It was Roy Lichtenstein, an artist who took panels from other people’s comic art and blew them up into single frames, who got him into comic art.
Comics aren’t the only artwork that had a tremendous influence on Nelson. Gustav Klimt’s use of white, open space as well as John Singer Sargent’s use of black space was also influential in Nelson’s art.
One flier in which Nelson experimented with the use of white space, an homage to Klimt, was a flier for The Most Secret Method which featured the band name in large bold letters across the top, and a small Olympic symbol standing alone amidst a background of white. The Olympic symbol had a frown in the middle circle, with the caption “F— the Olympics” underneath. Nelson said this was in protest to the fact that many people weren’t attending the show that night due to the Olympics. A lot of Nelson’s work, like the anti-Olympic flier, is tongue-in-cheek.
Toulouse LeTrec’s Art Nouveau work was also an influence for Nelson. “I love Toulouse LeTrec because he’s sloppy,” he said,” It’s full of life, you can’t fake that.”
Two of Nelson’s more recent inspirations are Raymond Pettibone, whose work for the band Black Flag is legendary, and Jaime Hernandez, who draws the Love and Rockets comic.
“As soon as I started drawing fliers everyone compared me to Raymond Pettibone,” Nelson said, “Even though I didn’t own a Black Flag record until I was 20.”
The thing he said he admires most about Hernandez’s work is his compositions. All of his panels, Nelson said, are composed beautifully.
Looking at Nelson’s fliers, it is easy to draw parallels between his work, and the work of those he admires. “I never actually tried to draw exactly what these guys do,” he said, their influence simply comes through.
Fonts, however, Nelson does try to copy sometimes, only by hand instead of with a computer. He also comes up with his own original fonts. The photos from which he draws the figures on his fliers are also his own.
“I had this whole thing with space, the atom, religion,” he said,”… the cat wearing a suit – that’s another thing I do all the time.”
These images can be seen repeated throughout Nelson’s fliers and album covers.
Fliers, unlike comics, were always something that attracted Nelson. “I was obsessed with them,” he said.
His walls were covered with punk rock fliers when he was a kid. His own progression into creating fliers, and working at Discord Records was natural. Just being involved in the D.C. punk scene, being at the shows and meeting people is what Nelson said he enjoys. He even silk-screened shirts for many local bands at no charge, just to do it.
When done well, Nelson said that fliers work and there is a sense of fusion between the flier and the event that you’re at. Of the fliers he’s produced, Nelson said, “It’s flattering when you go into someone’s house and you see your flier on their refrigerator.”
Although his work has been seen throughout the Washington D.C. punk scene, Nelson said, “I’m not a commercial success at all.”
But, after all, as he said, “The best art in history are labors of love.”
The Student Painting and Drawing Association sponsored Nelson’s appearance at ETSU. For more information on SPDA, call Ericka Basile at 943-2044.

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