Coop: All the Best Curves
By Mark Yarm

It's often been said that in "Paradise Lost," Milton gave the devil all the best lines. Likewise, in his work, L.A.-based illustrator and rock-poster artist Coop gives she-devils all the best curves.

Chris "Coop" Cooper is known for his lovingly rendered illustrations of voluptuous female demons in bawdy poses, sucking suggestively on a Popsicle, or going well beyond the suggestive with an accommodating nun. But he's probably best known for his picture of a grinning devil head clenching a lit cigar in his teeth. The image adorns everything from Zippo lighters to babydoll tees — merchandise available on his website — to the cover of his recently released career retrospective book, "Devil's Advocate: The Art of Coop."

A high priest of lowbrow art, Coop has created posters for the likes of Nirvana, Soundgarden, Green Day, Foo Fighters, Rocket From the Crypt, Bad Religion and Boss Hog. Aside from Satan and succubi, Coop's work — which has appeared everywhere from an Altoids ad to a display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — is populated by curvy human vixens, hotrod-riding B-movie monsters and retro-futuristic robots.

The 33-year-old Coop grew up in a suburb of Tulsa, Okla., where his artistic sensibility was shaped by comic books, sci-fi movies, car culture, punk rock and his dad's Playboy collection. He moved to California in the late '80s and by the mid-'90s was at the top of the rock-poster game, along with his friend Frank Kozik. In recent years, he's drifted from the music scene, leaving the creation of silkscreened concert posters to a younger crew.

"Coop doesn't exploit the occult metaphysics of satanic malarkey," writes underground art bigwig Robt. Williams in his forward to "Devil's Advocate." "Why should he? This gifted wonder-boy is the devil himself." Of course, this statement is malarkey itself – despite his affiliation with the Church of Satan and his all-black garb, Coop hardly personifies evil. There's a baby face beneath his devilish Vandyke, and in a recent conversation with Flak he was reasonable and surprisingly sweet. Then again, perhaps we should heed that oft-quoted line from the Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."

Flak: Your new book is called "Devil's Advocate: The Art of Coop." So what is it with you and the devil?

Coop: I started using the devil imagery just because it was really attractive to me and really seemed to get a reaction out of people. I've realized that that image of the devil does represent this idea of hedonism and enjoying your life and pleasure for its own sake. It's a reaction against this sort of puritanical kind of thinking that exists in America. And when I say puritanical, I mean not just a kind of conservative religious thinking, but also this sort of new Puritanism, this politically correct, liberal sort of Puritanism. You know, you can't eat meat and you can't have sex and you can't laugh at a dirty joke because you're harassing someone.

Flak: You did a recruitment poster for the Church of Satan. Are you a member?

Coop: Yes, I am. What does that entail? It entails nothing. In fact, the reason that I'm a member is because my wife and I were friends with Anton LaVey, the [late] founder of the Church of Satan, and at one point he decided that we were Satanists, whether we liked it or not, and made us members; made us priests, in fact. As far as my day-to-day responsibilities as a priest in the Church of Satan, there are none. Anton said, "What you're doing with your work and your life is Satanic," and that's why he made me a priest. I thought that was a terrific honor. But I don't have to run around in a cape and scare people or anything.

Flak: Do you literally believe in Satan?

Coop: No. Basically, Satanism is a philosophy masquerading as a religion. Satanism is just an understanding that man's true nature is an animal nature. It's really just sort of a workable, very pragmatic philosophy. It's a very good way of looking at the world and understanding people's motivations. Of course now I'm starting to make it sound like Scientology.

Flak: How much flak do you get for your portrayal of women?

Coop: I think a lot of people imagine that I get a lot of grief about it. But honestly, if anything, I get the opposite. Any time I do a personal appearance, I always have these girls come up to me who are more plump, voluptuous girls — they thank you for drawing women that look like them and they love me for it. Once we started the website to sell merchandise online and we started getting e-mail from customers, we quickly realized that more than half of them are women.

I'm certainly not a misogynist. Part of the reason why the majority of artwork I produce features women in it is because I love women — I'm fascinated by them, I'm obsessed with them, and my work revolves around them.

Flak: After looking at the images with the naughty nuns in your book, I have to ask, is there anything that you wouldn't illustrate?

Coop: The only thing I wouldn't draw is something that isn't interesting to me. As I get older, I'm really trying to train myself to get as close as possible to drawing the images in my subconscious, not what people will be interested in seeing or what will sell.

Flak: What are your criteria for commercial assignments, like the advertisement you did for Altoids? Are there certain people you wouldn't do work for?

Coop: I don't really do stuff unless I'm interested in it — the Altoids thing is a good example. I like Altoids. I eat Altoids. I have no moral problem with doing an advertisement for them. The ad agency came to me wanting my work, so they gave me a lot of freedom in what I did, and I was very happy with the end result. If I got a call from Coca-Cola tomorrow, I would probably do it.

I really like the times when something I've done goes out in the world and I lose control of it and I don't know where I'm going to see it. A couple of years ago, I did a set of computer fonts that were my handwritten type — those, of all the work I've done, have probably gone the most bizarre places that I never would have expected. McDonald's uses my fonts all the time in their TV commercials and their print ads. I go down the cereal aisle in the grocery store and I see my fonts all over cereal boxes. It's wonderful, because in a lot of ways that kind of packaging is what I'm inspired by as an artist.

Flak: Do you believe in the concept of selling out?

Coop: That whole kind of leftover punk rock integrity is really boring to me. If I got a call tomorrow to design a new car for Ford, I wouldn't look at that as selling out — to design an automobile would be the greatest thing in the world. But I'm sure there are plenty of leather-jacketed hoodlums standing around in record stores that would say that I'm a sellout for doing something like that.

Flak: Where'd you get the name for your publishing company, Aperient Press?

Coop: An aperient is a laxative. Actually, my wife came up with that name. It looks very good on a masthead; it looks very civilized and professional, until you find out what it means. It's kind of the perfect name for us.

Flak: Why is now the time for a retrospective book?

Coop: I've had people hounding me for five years to do a book. Basically, we just finally got to the point where we could afford to do it and could do it right. And also I thought there was enough work for a book.

I didn't want the book to be too text-heavy. I like for people to come to their own conclusions about my work. I think people definitely bring their own taste to it — I think that's part of the reason so many people have gotten tattoos of my work.

Flak: What are some of your favorite images in the book?

Coop: Usually my favorite piece of art that I've done is whatever I've done most recently. As I go back and look at some of the stuff in the book, which is 12, 14 years old, I see every mistake that I made and I just cringe when I look at it. In fact, when my designers were putting the book together, I had a constant battle with them because they wanted to include earlier and earlier stuff. I'm like, "No, that's ugly, it's horrible." They're like, "Well, nobody's ever seen this, it's really interesting and neat." But yeah, that doesn't mean I'm not still embarrassed by it.

Flak: How has your work grown, thematically speaking, over time?

Coop: My artwork sort of follows my interests. One thing that has been a big focus for me over the past year has been the realization that this is 2001 and that now we're living in this future that we've all been promised for 30 years and how we didn't really get what we were promised. We do have a space station now and we do have regular flights to outer space, as predicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but we don't have a cool space station where we can set Italian designer furniture, wear suits with cool thin lapels and have coffee. I want the future to look more like the future, and I've been trying to introduce that in my work. We finally have great little efficient electric cars, but they should have bubble tops and bat wings and more chrome — they definitely need more chrome.

Flak: Looking back on your childhood, what shaped your interests in hotrod and alternative culture?

Coop: I grew up in Oklahoma. Things like automobiles, that's just a part of your life when you grow up in the Midwest. My grandfather was a mechanic his whole life. I was just shaped by my environment. When I was a kid, I was always really into comic books and science fiction and television and movies and the usual pop culture, but also my family, my mother and father were very literate and I grew up with an appreciation for books and culture. I do remember when I was about 12 years old looking at the Ramones' Rocket to Russia album, looking at the drawings by John Holmstrom on the sleeve and on the back cover, and thinking to myself, "Boy, it would be really cool to have a job drawing album covers." And that's about the only thought I gave to my career until I actually started doing it.

Flak: When you did a band poster, how much interaction was there with the band itself?

Coop: Not a lot. Not because I'm trying to keep the band out of it. But generally speaking, when I was doing concert posters, the guys in these bands have all the same tastes I do, so pretty much all I do they're gonna go, [affects rocker voice] "Oh that's cool." Plus it's a fucking free poster [paid for by the venue] — how much can you bitch? In fact, there were many times when I would produce an image I was honestly surprised I could get away with because it was so obnoxious. Like the Ministry poster I did with the nun sitting on Jesus' back. I forget that people are offended by shit like that.

The only time I've ever heard a complaint from a band about the imagery was when I did a poster for the Sex Pistols for their reunion tour. I drew a really old punk rocker pushing a wheelbarrow full of money with a naked girl on top. I heard later that Johnny Rotten was complaining that I drew him as a crotchety old man, which he is. I thought that they would love that poster because it seemed to me that the whole point of that tour was to just cash in. Obviously he still has some artistic scruples, even if I don't.

Flak: What is the current state of rock poster art? Are you drifting away from that?

Coop: I haven't done a poster for a band in about three years. There really aren't any new bands that I'm really interested in doing work for, and a lot of the bands that I was doing work for aren't doing stuff any more. I started to realize that I could just do art posters that didn't have a band on them and then sell them to the same collectors who would buy band posters. Also there were a lot of younger guys who were coming up, doing posters, doing great work, and they wanted to do it a lot more than I did. So I felt like why the fuck shouldn't I just step aside and let other people do it?

Flak: How has the Web influenced your merchandising?

Coop: My wife quit a very successful job as a software engineer to run the website full time because she was making more money off the website. The nice thing about the website is we find that people like the idea that they're buying stuff directly from me. Somebody can send me an e-mail through my website and be fairly confident that I'll see it at some point. Whereas when I was 15 years old, I couldn't have written a letter to Sire Records and expected it to get to Joey Ramone.

Flak: What do you see in the future beyond the book?

Coop: I think that the book is going to really open up a lot of new possibilities for me. Somehow a book legitimizes you.

Now I'm working on a deal to do action figures; my characters as toys basically. The toys will be mass market — I don't think they'll be in Toys 'R' Us, but certainly they'll be in any comic book store.

Flak: Do you see yourself 30 years from now still drawing devil women and hotrods?

Coop: I don't know. Already now my work has changed a lot. I have a new sketchbook that I'm halfway through that doesn't have a single devil in it. The nice thing about doing the merchandising and having the stickers and stuff is all that work will always be there and always be available for people. People will always be able to buy a smoking devil head or whatever, so I don't have to keep doing it over and over and over. I can continue to pursue creating things that I'm interested in looking at. Some of them will be successful and people will want to buy them, and other things people will look at with disgust, and that's fine.

E-mail Mark Yarm at yarmyarm@yahoo.com.