Swipe File – Paul Rand gets Jacked
There used to be a great feature in the magazine The Comics Journal called the swipe file, where a classic piece of comic art was held up next to a more recent piece that usually resembled it a bit too much to be mere coincidence. The best know modern version is, of course, the You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice, But We Did… blog. Here’s a classic I stumbled across today while digging through a library sale trying to complete my collections of John Le Carre novels and Speedball Pen calligraphy manuals:
On the left we have: Paul Rand‘s cover to Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind from Vintage, 1953
On the right is: Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad: A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition by Arthur L. Kopit, A Spotlight Dramabook, 1960. Cover design by Alex Tsao.
I leave you to draw your own conclusions…
1 Comment
As the originator of “Swipe File” (really! that and “Minimalism” were my two enduring contributions to the Journal), I have to say that Paul Rand is surely among the most swiped designers in history. Not only specific images like this (good catch, by the way), but his whole style.
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