Topless women, superheroes, ‘afronauts’ and mutants: these are just some of the characters featured in the work of Pedro Bell, an artist and illustrator who described himself on Funkadelic’s 1978 album, One Nation Under a Groove, as an ‘electric marker heathen of speedomatic dabblings’. The Chicago-born artist, who died last week aged 69, was best known for his album-cover artwork that imagined a universe in which blackness, science fiction, sex and mythology collided. His charged imagery transported musical protagonists, including Funkadelic and singer George Clinton, to utopian worlds where cosmology and hypersexuality reigned supreme. 

Clinton thought of Bell as an ‘urban Hieronymus Bosch’ who ‘inverted psychedelia through the ghetto’. Bell’s work was key in drawing audiences to Funkadelic music: his Technicolor packaging combined pop-cultural references and comic book-style narratives with quirky slogans and Afrocentric imagery.