Foreword from Gravity’s Rainbow ILLUSTRATED Zak Smith An artist draws one picture for every page of Thomas Pynchon’s masterwork
So . . . what the fuck? So why does a guy best known for portraits of half-naked punk-porn chicks decide one day to sit down and illustrate every single page of a relentlessly difficult classic of twentieth-century literature? Last year a newspaper wanted an article out of me on roughly that topic. If there was a punk-porn/Pynchon connection. I didn’t know what it was, but I told the guy I’d give it a shot and hung up the phone. I did know there was a go-go dancing, fire-eating, tattooed anarchist lying on my bed, and I knew she was busy reading Vineland out loud—and that was about it. A few days later, I went to Los Angeles and met lots of pornographers. The first pornographer had the muted post horn from Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 tattooed on his arm. He told me to read Steve Erickson.
So why does a guy best known for portraits of half-naked punk-porn chicks decide one day to sit down and illustrate every single page of a relentlessly difficult classic of twentieth-century literature?