Grave Digger – The Last Supper
(digipack)
Colour: 4-colour Booklet: 12 pages, matte paper, page 1 glued to the packet Typography: Gothic typing Pictures: 4-colour illustrations + one band photograph Bonus material: none Designers: Gyula Havancsak (Cover and booklet artwork), Stefan Malzkorn (Photos)
Grave Digger´s 13th sutdio album follows the story of Jesus Christ himself and his last days before crucifixion. I´ve always enjoyed this band eventhough most of their material is a bit average stuff. But the jewels every now and then are so good you just got to like this German band who started their career in 1980.
Since I bought ”The Last Supper” I´ve been wanting to write down some good thoughts about the artwork of this album. Beside the design, I also enjoy many of the songs such as the title track ”The Last Supper”, ”Grave in the No Man´s Land” and the best song on this album ”Crucified”. Intro song ”Passion” is also very enjoyable. It guides you perfectly to the album and reflects the artwork.
Booklet and artwork designer is the famous Gyula Havancsak who has done amazing designs to artists such as Annihilator, Destruction, Nightingale, Demonoid and Tankard. The list goes on. With this album Gyula doesn´t fail you. Beautiful pix throughout the booklet is beautiful to watch and view. Catching the spirit of Christ´s last days is not easy task to do. You need to make it beautiful and agonizing at the same time. Challenging.
Grave Digger is famous of using the hangman in their covers and the reaper himself fits pretty well in this also. Haunting, waiting and watching Jesus. Gyula has captured the reaper well into the imaginary.
One of my favourite pictures here are the centerfold pic with Jesus already hanging and two different moons shining in the night. The other one I like is on the second page where you can see maggots crawling from piece of bread. I say excellent!
Details are always important and you can find very different details from all the illustrations here. I´d like to have some of the pics hanging in my wall with huge size. I could probably stare at them many hours. Well, except for the maggots…
Paper choice in this booklet is matte and it is perfect. You can´t get the same feeling with concept like this on glossy paper. Although techically there is one minor problem and it is the text readability. Matte paper sucks the print colour so much and you need to have a bit bigger typesize. Some of the text in this booklet is pretty hard to read because of that and also because of the typeface. It is very beautiful and excellent choice but sometimes hard to read. All and all there isn´t much to complain about this. Good cd design is not just the cover. It is the whole package whatever it includes (cd disc, paper wrappings, stickers, back cover…). It needs to work as a whole. This one does, big time!
GOOD:
+ Perfect illustration + Matte paper + Feeling
BAD:
– Text is hard to read at some point – Glued booklet
School grade: 5/5
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