Guitar in a seductive pose — spot illustration from A-D Gallery invitation to Flora’s first New York City exhibition, June 1943.

Pen & ink on sketch tablet paper, 1995. If you’re wondering where Conakry is located, it’s on the coast of Wikistan.

Journalist/author/design historian Steve Heller brings a nicey to the Flora stora on his PRINT Magazine blog. Heller, who penned the 1998 New York Times obit for Flora, also wrote the Foreward in our first book, The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora. P.S. If the guy on the right at left looks familiar, here’s why.

Detail: undated, untitled, and unidentified commercial illustrationca. late 1960s/early 1970s

“Next [Amelia and Pepito] went to the puppet show, and then they watched the acrobats. Best of all they liked the toy vendor. Pepito finally decided to buy a jumping jack. Amelia bought a rag doll and named it after her best friend Rosita because both of them had red cheeks.” Draft illustration, The Fabulous Firework Family, Flora’s first published children’s book (1955). Image from the James Flora Papers, Archives & Special Collections at the…

That’s what we call this beastie, who seems to be self-administering a third-eye implant while balancing a bird with no eyes on his fingertip. The original art is—well, we have no idea. The image appeared in very reduced form (postage stamp-sized) on a Flora business card from the 1950s.

Sketchbook untitled elements, with glue residueca. 1941-43

Draft overlay, The Day the Cow Sneezed, 1957, found amid the James Flora Papers in the Dr. Irvin J. Kerlan Collection, University of Minnesota. Who was Dr. Kerlan?

Pencil sketches for Till Eulenspiegel LP cover, 1955. The above skeletal figures eventually morphed into this rough layout: … which was refined as this unfinished tempera setting: … which evolved into this finished RCA Victor Red Seal cover: Till Eulenspiegel was an impudent prankster in German folklore. Flora rendered several pen and ink drawings of the trickster in the 1990s. Perhaps he recognized a kindred spirit.

Untitled tempera on card stock, dated 6/42. Hydra-headed mutants abound during this transitional period in Flora’s life. Just a few months earlier he had departed his native Ohio and relocated to Connecticut to take a job with the Columbia Records art department under Alex Steinweiss. Actually, Flora never outgrew multi-headed mutants with bonus appendages. They recur in every period of his artistic life.