Monsters Ink 

The artist Roy Gonzalez reached a pinnacle of success between 1987 and 1992 as an illustrator of surf-related decals, t-shirts, murals, and comic books. But by the time a serious investigation into the subculture began to take shape in the latter half of the 1990s, he was almost completely forgotten. 

The boyish qualities of his early artwork—based unmistakably in the 1960s cartoon monsters of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth and the early surf-finks of Rick Griffin—proved irresistible to teenaged surfers and skaters of the era. More a continuation of the Roth/Griffin strategy than a direct homage, each character in his “Monster Island” t-shirt line (1987) spoke the contemporary visual language of punk and New Wave, and was pitched at a mainstream audience (as opposed to a niche or retro one). The fact that Gonzalez’s work also testified to an underlying tension between corporate influences in surfing and its waning bohemian impulses may have added to the neglect of his legacy. 

Several of the artist’s works appeared in the Kustom Kulture exhibition at the Laguna Beach Art Museum in 1993, despite the fact that Gonzalez did not draw hot rods. When the same museum, with the same curators (Bolton Colburn and Craig R. Stecyk), mounted the Surf Culture exhibition in 2002, Gonzalez was conspicuously absent. 

“They seemed to go out of their way,” he recalls from his current home in Costa Rica, “to not invite me or John Van Hamersveld,” the latter the creator of the iconic poster for The Endless Summer.

These days, Gonzalez still lives a bohemian lifestyle, eking out a living as a freelance illustrator, while many of his generational contemporaries have made the crossover to “gallery artists,” their work finding refuge in the collections of private persons under the banner of “lowbrow art” (as the genre has been known since the early 90s). When I caught up with him last year, he was shacking up with a friend in Dominical, working on a “history of surfing” mural to help raise funds for Costa Rica’s Olympic surf team. By the following month he’d added second and third commissions: a “Surfing U.S.A.” mural to be painted in Washington D.C., then another for the actual 2020 Olympic Games in Japan. 

Soon after, he sent me PDFs for a proposed graphic novel based partially on cartoons he’d already published in Surf Crazed—the 90s comic book he co-created with surfer/illustrator Salvador Paskowitz—featuring added storylines and other new elements. Other projects in the works included a new line of t-shirts he’s designed based on the old characters from “Monster Island” (updated with new tattoo-style fonts and contemporary stone washes), a new logo for a “superfoods product,” and a line of Aloha shirts for “a friend.”

The creative energy Gonzalez still displays, day-to-day, is impressive. Yet following his process from inspiration to conclusion has proven difficult. Phone conversations and Skype sessions are often a jumble of personal experiences, name-dropping, and hard-knocks philosophy. Trying to pin down an exact timeline of the artist’s creative output, and even his biographical data, is nearly impossible.

From what I can gather, he was born in 1960 in San Clemente, California, to parents of Irish and Mexican-American heritage. In 1978, the National Scholastic Surfing Association named him its kneeboard champion. In 1979, he graduated from San Clemente High School as a member of its first surf team. His artistic talent was already apparent.

Gonzalez says he began drawing caricature portraits of teachers and classmates in middle school—the latter to keep the bullies at bay. He was still a child when West Coast cartooning first emerged as its own new genre, separate from the epicenters of publishing and syndication in New York, Paris, and London. “Big Daddy” Roth and Griffin both hit pay dirt around 1962 with their paradigmatic Rat Fink and Murphy characters, respectively, each pushing hot rod and surf culture into the mainstream for the first time. They, and other illustrators in the genre, remained relevant in the subculture throughout the 60s. Yet by the 70s and 80s, when Gonzalez himself came of age, the game had changed. 

Griffin made the fluid transition from beatnik surfer to psychedelic mystic over the course of the 60s, then reached a pinnacle of inventiveness in the early 70s. Roth, who had a near-fatal run-in with the Hells Angels in 1972, closed Roth Studios around that time, converted to Mormonism, and got a job operating the bumper car ride at Knott’s Berry Farm. In 1982, the U.K. post-punk band Birthday Party plucked him out of obscurity and commissioned him to create cover art for their third LP, Junkyard, but Roth farmed out the actual illustration to a young artist named Dave Christensen, whose monster decals for the Tony Alva Skateboards/Alva Rocks line of wheels served as the basis of the album design. 

By this time, Gonzalez was out of school and trying to make it as both a professional surfer and a professional artist. His first paid gig was for a 1982 surfing calendar, which he created for Ocean Pacific surfwear. From the get-go, his work showed an interest in both vintage forms and contemporary design. Using John Severson’s classic Mickey Muñoz/Quasimodo photograph from the 60s as reference on its cover, Gonzalez stenciled his subject in stark black and white, à la the Raymond Pettibon illustrations of early Black Flag album covers, and surrounded the image with a checkered border straight out of the ska/punk revival. He wrote in an unpublished autobiography from 2011 that he’d “designed it to sell to girls” and included a catalog of the then-hottest new surfers around (e.g. Laird Hamilton and Tommy Curren) inside the calendar. Ads were taken out by O.P. in Seventeen and Tiger Beat magazines and the female demographic, claims Gonzalez, responded by “stuffing my P.O. box full of envelopes with money.” 

While this early success may have signaled to the artist that his work was both in the vanguard and able to touch a mass audience, he couldn’t help but notice major changes afoot in the industry. “Big money had come into it,” he writes in his autobiography. “The N.S.S.A. wetsuit I’d been embarrassed to wear years before wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow in 1984. Contests featured corporate clones, their boards covered with stickers representing companies whose bottom line was profit, not surfing. Low talent surfers with their bland, clean-cut, conformist image were winning contests doing boring, repetitive turns. Spandex and skin-tight lycra became acceptable beach fashion for these kooks.” 

At risk was the entire underground subculture of surfing, he continues. “All the other shops in town had already sold out to corporate interests. What I wanted to do was open a good, old fashioned, hardcore surf shop.” 

Gonzalez opened the Surf Spot on El Camino Real in 1985. “We gained instant rebel status,” he recalls, “with the best surfers and the worst reputation on the coast.” Bad boys such as Matt Archbold, Sean “Red” O’Connell, and Dino Andino formed the core of the shop’s early surfing team. “The greedy nerds who had a stranglehold on our beach culture forgot one simple rule: youth is truth.” 

An early drawing by the artist from this period features a hulking illustration of Mickey Mouse, covered in crude tattoos, with a homicidal look in his eyes and his feet tearing through a worn-out pair of Chuck Taylors. His right hand strangles a scrawny cat in a t-shirt that reads “Team Trend,” whilst his left pulses electricity through the rest of his body. Though indicative of Gonzalez’s past heroes, nothing in the Roth or Griffin canon ever approached this level of provocation or contempt.

By 1987, Gonzalez had spawned an entire universe of monster-fink creatures, which he dubbed “Monster Island.” The world exists as widescreen color illustrations of a dozen or so characters, with names such as Gory Rory, Rip & Roll, and Tongue Plant. Asked how he conceived such a place, Gonzalez replies simply: “I filled it with all the things I was into—no limits, no boundaries.”

A full line of “Monster Island” t-shirts and decal stickers quickly followed. For these, the artist streamlined his characters to meet the standards set down by Roth/Griffin decals—each figure against a white backdrop, their details and colors reduced to a few eye-popping hues and strokes, which lost nothing in the transition. The aforementioned Gory Rory is a playful skater version of H.R. Giger’s famous monster from the film Alien (1979), his glowing eyes and sharp incisors a threat only to those outside “the club.” T.N.T. Demon seems a not-so-subtle self-portrait of the artist himself being shot out on a skateboard from a tombstone, which reads: “R.I.P. Hendrix, R.I.P. Sid Vicious, R.I.P. Gonzalez.” The series was also disseminated as part of a Gonzalez-produced trading card set, which sold as inserts in packages of Surf Spot Wax. 

The distributor of “Monster Island” was an upstart company called Sunshine Designs, which inserted the Gonzalez line into its larger SurfZoids imprint. The artist claims his shirts and decals sold through the roof in 1987 and 1988, adding that offers soon emerged for both a Saturday morning cartoon based on the characters and a line of plastic toys. When a major manufacturer in New York City offered the artist a deal for a second line of “Monster Island” t-shirts, however, Gonzalez says, “The shit hit the fan.”

As Gonzalez remembers it, the original agreement between himself and Sunshine Designs was little more than a handshake. Later, he realized he’d actually signed away the house in a work-for-hire contract that gave the company everything—the characters already created, plus any new ones related to the line. 

“I lost everything in an instant,” reflects Gonzalez in his autobiography. What’s more, the Surf Spot was in financial doldrums, and soon had to close its doors for good. “I was so sick of everything,” the artist reflects ruefully, “especially kissing asses for money. I just told everyone to fuck off. Then a few days later, I was sitting in my bedroom wondering what the hell I was going to do.”

He designed a few new logos in 1989 and 1990, including one for his friend Christian Fletcher’s surfboard line, as well as ads and cartoons for Surfer and Thrasher magazines. His hero, Rick Griffin, had also briefly returned to Surfer, having transformed his old Murphy character of the 1960s from a teenage surf-fink to a middle-aged surfer/mystic. It was around this time that Gonzalez says he realized “the [Surf Crazed] comic book was something I needed to do for myself.” As it turned out, his life-long friend, Salvador Paskowitz, was thinking the same thing. As an avid follower of superhero and sci-fi films, Paskowitz wanted to create something that spoke to true surfers. Gonzalez says he was more influenced by Mad magazine and Zap Comix, and wanted to use the project to make a personal statement on society. 

Issue #1 of Surf Crazed came out in the summer 1991. Paskowitz had the opening story: a post-apocalyptic tale titled “Riders of Steel,” replete with female robots in bikinis and flying surf warriors, equal parts Transformers and Silver Surfer. The illustrations were perfunctory, the writing masculine fantasy and mostly inscrutable. Yet overall it showed a solid level of imagination. No such drawbacks applied to the Gonzalez works, however. 

Besides creating the book’s cover image, a mix of hippie cartoon style and 90s punk, Gonzalez also inhabited its center spread. Titled “Aloha from Hell,” the two-page splash was a psychedelic vision par excellence. Every influence from his past was brought to bear: cartoon monsters, old-school burlesque, tattoo art, caricature drawing, and blacklight posters. All were assembled in accord, with a stout Satan figure taking center stage. The character sips rum from a tiki mug as a younger version of himself shoots the curl through an ocean of molten lava in the background. A quartet of red-skinned, female hula dancers on the left side of the image raises the unflappable decadence to sweltering levels.

Over the next ten pages, Gonzalez turned the surrealism up to eleven by again pushing the traditional boundaries of illustration and design. Drawing on the famous “Keep on Truckin’” motif of R. Crumb’s Zap Comix, the artist inked a floppy-haired slacker en route to the morning waves. At first, the character nabs a few sweet rides, hits on a trio of scantily-dressed girls on the beach, packs up his board, and readies himself to head home—a typical day. Then the strangest thing happens. 

Paddling out into the surf—duck diving and straddling—he encounters the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll himself: Elvis Presley. This is followed by a gorgeous set of panels depicting the late music icon riding a shortboard, cutting back through the curl, rendered in a kind of stop-motion design that draws to mind both Griffin’s detailed line work from his 70s Tales from the Tube comics, as well as Marcel Duchamp’s breakthrough surrealist painting from 1912, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. The combination feels intuitive, almost natural. The same can be said for the conspiratorial angle—a declaration of intents: Don’t believe what they tell you.

Issue #2 proved that Gonzalez’s new, visionary style was no fluke. This time, his unnamed, sandy surf-rat heads out to look for the soul of surfing—only to find none other than James Brown, sliding down a big one, toes on the nose. The two hold a brief conversation as the next set rolls in, after which the kook asks Brown why he beats his wife. Brown responds that it was self-defense, and professes
he now goes surfing whenever the temperature at home gets too hot. By the end, the two are crooning “Please, Please, Please” as a kind of mea culpa to the universe—a final splash page depicting the music icon as a crucified Jesus Christ, surrounded by tiki torches, palm trees, and dolphins—soul surfing rendered as religious sorrow.

A final masterpiece in Issue #5 showed the artist at his most caustic and politically astute. Titled “Slash Jordan and the Killer Waves,” it tells the story of a blonde-haired, muscular surfer who, by chance, overhears a grisly old pirate telling Star Trek’s Mr. Spock about a massive killer wave that just swallowed his entire ship. (“Highly illogical,” is Spock’s reply.) Slash, however, finds the tale intriguing, and hits the old bandit up for exact coordinates, which sends him 30 planets from our current solar system to see this towering blue-green curl for himself.

Once there, he recognizes its terrifying beauty, rendered in stacks of detailed, almost-abstract ripples and gradient hues, à la Griffin at his most tripped out. Rows and rows of bloodstained, razor-sharp fangs hang off the end of the wave in an acerbic twist on the 70s spoof Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Unconscious attitudes have become so pervasive, the work seems to say, that the great sea has no choice but to fight back. 

In the aftermath of Surf Crazed, Gonzalez found himself in high-demand. He painted large-scale murals in Maui and Costa Rica, and spent much of the 90s creating new logos and ad campaigns for a darker, less-cartoony fashion line called F.A.B. (Fucked At Birth). By this time, the industry had shifted so dramatically that the work with F.A.B.—based heavily in the rap/metal style so popular in Orange County at the time—felt like a first serious dip in quality for the artist.

The overall effect of corporatization in the 80s, in fact, left much of the arts media in a state of fracture by the 90s. The gentrification of cartooning and animation by Disney, Pixar, and Marvel cleared out much of the subculture that had worked alongside (and often influenced) the mainstream for decades. In its wake was the emergence of retro as a cottage industry or niche market. Yet Gonzalez, who was neither polished enough for the new homogenized mainstream nor purist enough to meet the demands of lowbrow or retro, became one of the most obvious victims of this exceptional shift. 

A solo exhibition finally came in 2009, his first-ever, at the Motel No Tell, a remodeled dive lodging in San Clemente. Gonzalez packed it to the rafters with works from his entire career, including framed paintings, screen prints, a walk-through hallway of 3D mural art, and hosts of custom shortboards and skateboard decks. 

A few years later, he opened Art Sub Kult, the second of two gallery spaces he’s launched in the new millennium. (The other was called El Chingadero, which opened in 2001 in Laguna Beach, and lasted about a year.) His as-yet-unpublished autobiography tries to make sense of it all, with lines like: “Egos, human error, lack of funds, stress, personal problems, bad management, and bad decisions—these and more have caused many of my creations to die a premature death.” 

Since that time, the artist has tried to focus on legacy pieces—the graphic novels based on his Surf Crazed and “Monster Island” characters being one example. How he can secure the rights to
these characters is still an unknown. Regardless, Gonzalez’s archival body reflects a unique vernacular tradition in West Coast art that was still unfolding when he found it. Looking back now, he seems the last of his kind—a forward-thinking modernist adding one more new color to a style that would soon be reduced to pastiche and nostalgia. Whether he, or the culture itself, can ever find its way back to relevance remains a question mark. In the meantime, there sits Roy Gonzalez, tucked away in a small corner of the world, pen still firmly in hand, hidden in plain sight.