Taking his cue from 1950s album covers, TV program title art, and common illustrations used in everything from health manuals to instruction manuals, author/designer Gary Scott Beatty has created Jazz: Cool Birth, a jazz club murder mystery in comic book form.  Jazz: Cool Birth, which won Beatty a recent Xeric Foundation grant, will be solicited in the upcoming September issue of Diamond’s Previews under Aazurn Publishing.

 

In Jazz: Cool Birth Beatty attempts to create the atmosphere of the late night jazz clubs of the 1950s with visuals and typography firmly rooted in the designs of that decade, a decade in which designers made a sharp break from the longstanding tradition of paint and ink magazine illustration in favor of flat planes of color, raw geometric elements assembled with an improvisational flair, and an innovative use of typography that was at once both free in its spacing and precise in its overall effect.

 

Jazz: Cool Birth is not a comic book for everyone, but it is the result of its creator’s long obsession with and immersion in the cutting edge “beat generation” designers of the 1950s, and as such, it is a must for anyone interested either in design or in the decade of the 1950s.  If you want to go deeper into the design ethos of the late 1950s than what you see on Mad Men, this is the comic for you.