Gig Posters

Gig posters for the Huns are all characterized by the same aggressively sub-amateur cut and paste style, less influenced by "punk" traditions than by the first ever Huns poster, done by some Iowa Writer for a literary magazine benefit, which included the famous photo of Elvis shaking hands with Richard Nixon. Those were the kind of pure Americana icons the Huns identified with, and Elvis would appear on at least a couple more posters. Also inherited from that poster was the term "Dance Party," which the Huns would stubbornly, ironically, continue to use for 10 S. Gilbert gigs.

John made many of the posters despite not having any design skills and returned to themes involving kitch characters and icons as well as personal heroes like Johnny Ramone and Johnny Rotten; cartoon and comic book figures were used, as well as old magazine images from the university library. Alan Frommelt made a couple posters too, and Duke did the Starport poster, throwing in his own little touches like "Beer Specials!" and an image of the Cross of Lorraine. The last poster here was done by Rich Eicher for the legendary "Psychedelic Huns" gig, and you can see that, lame as it was, it was clearly influenced by the Huns gig poster style, including the unbashed use of crayon. Look at these one at a time and they're almost charming. But seeing them here all together you can't help but think ... how many orders of magnitude better could they have been?

The best of the bunch is clearly the "Dance Dance Dance" poster with military rockettes done for the St. Valentines Day Massacre Sock Hop in 1982, designed by a mysterious punkette hairdresser whose name has evaporated along with the beer puddles in the church basement.