96 Drawings of David Bowie by the “World’s Best Comic Artists”: Michel Gondry, Kate Beaton & More

Pope Bowie

There is a David Bowie for every season. A Christmas David Bowie, a Halloween David Bowie, even a David Bowie Easter celebration. But much more than that, there may be a David Bowie for every Bowie fan, especially for artists influenced by his chameleonic career. See for yourself how a whopping 96 Bowie-loving artists—in this case mainly what Bowie himself calls the “World’s Best Comic Artists”—see the changling rock star/actor/space alien.

Gondry Bowie

“See my life in a comic… The little details in colour,” writes Bowie on his site of a web gallery of portraits compiled by “comic artist, writer and critic, not to mention huge Bowie fan, Sean T. Collins.” It’s called The Thin White Sketchbooka clever title that alludes to just one of the myriad Bowie personae represented in the sizeable collection of 96 drawings (see a nostalgic one by prolific illustrator Paul Pope at the top—the book’s first sketch).

Collins’ impressive collection includes work from Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), whose contribution the editor calls “pretty goddamn wonderful if you ask me.” See it above. And below, Kate Beaton, creator of web comic Hark, A Vagrant, gives us Bowie as a dandy, a character with whom, writes Collins, she has a “rich history.”

Beaton-Bowie

Collins offers brief commentary beneath each image in the collection, which also gives us the strange interpretation below by Bowie-inspired underground comics legend Charles Burns; the intense and Archie-esque contributions further down by Brothers Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, creators of the 80s New Wave classic comic Love and Rockets; and the outer space-proportioned Bowie at the bottom of the post, from vocalist Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio, a band that has both covered and recorded with Bowie.

Burns Bowie

Hernandez Bowie

Hernandez 2 Bowie

Tunde Bowie

View the full set of Bowie drawings, no two remotely the same, at The Thin White Sketchbook’s Flickr page.

via Buzzfeed.

Related Content:

50 Years of Changing David Bowie Hair Styles in One Animated GIF

David Bowie Releases Vintage Videos of His Greatest Hits from the 1970s and 1980s

David Gilmour & David Bowie Sing “Comfortably Numb” Live (2006)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness


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