Heavy, Humid Book: Jake Kelly’s new tome gathers a history of bands, clubs and Cleveland visual culture

Ephemera is a part of visual culture we often forget in the art world, but which can both evoke and document an era as strongly as music and fashion. Nothing says San Francisco in the ‘60s like a Wes Wilson poster for a concert at the Filmore. Except for what collectors put aside, the overwhelming majority of posters and fliers serve their purpose and vanish in landfills or recycling bins. But perhaps Cleveland’s most prolific maker of posters and fliers, Jake Kelly has gathered as near a complete-works volume as we’re ever likely to see in a new book. His Heavy Humid World: Posters And Fliers 1995 – 2025 compiles more than 1400 of his works in roughly chronological order, documenting his own art and a particular era of Cleveland’s underground culture.  It’s fair to say that the flier art of Jake Kelly says turn-of-the-21^st Century, post-industrial Cleveland as loudly as anything representing the psychedelic era did for San Francisco.

When the time frame of this book began, the phone poles of Coventry in Cleveland Heights were covered, waist high to about seven feet, with stapled-up flyers for everything going on in the cool world—the bands performing, the poetry readings, the nascent political movements, the lost cats, the culture jamming. It’s not coincidence that the elevation of flyer culture mirrors that of graffiti, both their limits defined by the reach of the artists. This was guerilla promotion by the self-appointed.  In the digital, what that has left behind is the crust of staples on the phone poles, like a rusty band of bark. That’s the nature of ephemera. It goes away.

But gathered in a book like this, and chronologically organized, it becomes several things. It’s a document of history: the bands that were playing, the venues that came and went. Remember that time in the early 2000s when beloved Cleveland garage rockers, the New Salem Witch Hunters headlined, with the Tough and Lovely from Columbus opening for them at the Beachland Tavern? That’s in there. Or remember that bookstore on Madison, the Flying Lemur? Or that place on East 185^th—the Studio Gallery, run by the late Chris Disantis? Remember Speak In Tongues? Remember the Pieta? Those venues are all there, partly because those were Kelly’s haunts. He lived for a time at Speak In Tongues.

In his introduction, Kelly describes having drawn fliers for bands there, among other underground venues, and then around the year 2000—urged by his girlfriend—walking into the Grog Shop and the Beachland Ballroom to pitch his services for “like twenty dollars a flier.” Both took him up on the offer, and became regular customers.

Heavy Humid World is also a Jake Kelly art retrospective. It shows the evolution of his own style, from a time of sketchier lines mixed with photos and cut-paper, ransom note-style collage, to bolder, more confident drawings, with flowing lines and implied narrative.

All the flyers in the book are black and white. Kelly says he knew from age four that he wanted to draw comics, and that there was a division of labor in that world, with one person writing the story, another drawing it in pencil, someone else doing the lettering, someone else coloring it in. So he focused on getting good at drawing. “Several years later, [he] discovered the world of underground comics- Clowes, Crumb, Burns, Ducet, etc- and this world of the “comic book auteur” was revealed. “I came to believe- and still do- that the best comics were the product of a single person writing, drawing, and obsessing over every other detail of a book. […] Luckily, most of these were in black and white! Right around this time, I was also getting obsessed with DIY punk rock and making fanzines, starting to make my first comics, playing in bands, and making fliers for shows. All of these things in some way revolved around copy machines, so creating art that reproduced well as a xerox was important.”

Surrealism flourishes on these pages. Eyes pop out, sometimes, literally, sometimes like the heads of snakes, sometimes just in a torrent of zig-zag energy, as in the drawing for a Dios Malos show at the Grog Shop. Figures have many, many eyes, as in a flyer for This Moment In Black History, at the Beachland. A flyer for the band Yoid, which I once heard described as a “17 Guitar Orchestra” performing at the Grog Shop is dominated by a single figure that has perhaps aging, decrepit trees for legs, topped by a bunch of grapes, or whatever those ovoid shapes ma be. In the flyer for The Splits, Woven Bones and the Homostupids at the Beachland, there’s a central figure—the bust of a man—with the names of the bands blasting off the top of his head, with its wandering eyes and gritted teeth. There are monsters, like the hairy, bigfoot-like figure in the headlights of an oncoming car in the flyer for Rocket from the Tombs at the Beachland. If you can think of a drug to abuse, it’s probably in there.

It’s not all bands. There’s a flyer for the Scum City Scramble alley cat bike race, with a bike polo match and a tricks and skids contest. The cyclist leans over, resting on her handlebars, with one cigarette in her mouth, another in her hand, and in her other hand an open bottle in a paper bag.

And there’s culture jamming. Riffing on “lost dog” posters, one presents the picture of a pooch, describes how it was eaten, and tells readers, if this was your dog, and if you have another one, call this number so he can eat that one as well. There’s a row of tear-off phone numbers at the bottom. Another poster offers “stew cats for sale.” “Perfectly healthy cats and kittens, good for stews, stir frys, deep fry, or barbecue.” Again, with the tear-off numbers. Those were pranks on a friend, who had moved from Cleveland to Seattle, and his phone number was real. “He may even still have a tape of the irate messages he got,” Kelly says. “People were particularly upset by Stew Cats.”

Someone reading this probably has on their book shelves the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary—that two-volume set of the comprehensive authority on the English Language. It distills the many-volume, encyclopedic set into two, which came boxed with a magnifying glass because each page of the two gigantic volumes comprised four, photographically reduced pages from the original. Heavy Humid World does the same thing, with the overwhelming majority of the flyers—originally 8.5 X 11 inches—reproduced four-up. So they are not full-sized reproductions, but that’s a necessary evil to present more than 1400 flyers in a single volume. Toward the back, when Kelly was drawing posters at 11 X 17, especially riffing on Grateful Dead skull and skeleton imagery for the band Grateful Shred—the posters run on full pages, but still reduced from their original.

This book is amazing to look at for Kelly’s endless supply of surreal visions. It will certainly hold its own as reference material for Cleveland music and club history. Every public library in Northeast Ohio should have it on their shelves.  To buy a copy, go to pavetheocean.com.  As this is published December 14, you can still order a copy in time for Christmas. Or if you live in the area, avoid any uncertainty by catching the artist himself in his booth at the Beachland Holiday Flea.

Heavy, Humid World: Posters and Fliers 1995 – 2025
By Jake Kelly
Paperback, 2025, $65
PavetheOcean.com