16 Times Comic Book Artists Absolutely Rocked Hip-Hop Album Cover Art

Geeks rule everything around you.

Paco Taylor
16 min readMar 23, 2020

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From that body-rocking moment in time back in 1979, when Sugar Hill Gang rapper Big Bank Hank waxed poetic about the Mack game that he’d once spit to Superman’s girlfriend (reporter Lois Lane), the love affair the hip-hop generation has with comic books was pretty much set in stone.

Or, more accurately, etched into the grooves of black, 12” vinyl.

In the four-plus decades since record needles were first dropped onto Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”, the technologies that we use to listen to music now have changed significantly. But the intersecting links that were forged between comic nerd culture and hip-hop music culture haven’t.

If anything, they’ve gotten deeper.

De La Soul - Three Feet High and Rising, 1989 (Tommy Boy Records) • Extraordinary X-Men #1, Hip-hop Variant Cover by Sanford Green, 2015 (Marvel Comics)

Today, publishers like Marvel Comics make generous use of genius promo gimmicks (see: the hip-hop homage variant covers series) to show the love that rap music fans have for comics isn’t an unrequited one. The comics industry sends its very own…

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Paco Taylor
Paco Taylor

Written by Paco Taylor

Paco writes about Eastern & Western pop culture, history, and art. He has bylines at CBR, G-Fan, Comics Beat, NeoText, and Nextshark | stpaco@gmail

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