Last year we did our first poster of the year award and while we are doing that again this year, we also wanted to recognize an artist whose work blew us away for the year. This year was tough as there were a number of fine illustrators who put out numerous alternative movie posters. After some initial consideration we narrowed down our list to a handful including, Krzysztof Domaradzki, Matt Taylor, Paul Mann, Phantom City Creative and Kwow. From this group it was really tough to pick a winner as each one was able to consistently produce exquisite pieces that combined composition, execution and just overall wow factor. In the end it came down to the artist whose work made our jaws drop all year long and created a variety of movie posters, and that distinction belongs to Matt Taylor.
In 2024, there was no shortage of awesome works from Taylor and it felt like we were always posting about one of his new pieces. It started with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, released in February via Spoke Art, a piece Taylor says was years in the making. It tied in with a screening of the film and released in three different editions.
He quickly followed that up with Dune: Part Two, one of the first released alternative movie posters from the newly minted Mutant. This dropped in regular and variant editions and was one of our favorite AMPs for the film.
In addition to these official releases with the different poster houses, Taylor also produced some excellent prints via private commissions on Facebook. A lot of the best alternative movie posters come from these groups and the ones Taylor produced for them came out awesome. First, was a Scott Pilgrim vs. The World piece in the vein of old Super Nintendo game cartridge box art. We’ve seen a couple of artists make a play on these old video game covers and they always look fantastic and stir that sense of nostalgia. The other commission came from the 1996 version of Romeo + Juliet that starred Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Next up were some prints for the New York Comic-Con and San Diego Comic-Con shows, both released via Spoke Art with Ghost X Ghost also assisting with the NYCC piece. For the San Diego show Taylor created an impressive set of prints for Kiki’s Delivery Service. The details in this artwork were superb and likenesses to the Miyazaki film were immaculate. This one also dropped in a variety of editions, with the variant being our favorite.
For the NYCC show, he created magnificent artwork for the original Godzilla film. We just love the look and style of this one as it is currently hanging up in our workspace. Amazingly, there are still prints for sale on the Spoke Art website.
As if one Godzilla print was not enough, Spoke Art and Ghost X Ghost put on a 70th anniversary show of the iconic Kaiju with Taylor providing a regular and variant print for Godzilla vs. Hedorah. There was a lot of great Godzilla artwork at the show, most of which is still available for purchase.
Taylor closed out the year with one more screening and a co-release print with Mutant and CODA. In October CODA did a screening of the Wes Anderson film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. For this release Taylor produced a set of pieces. CODA and Mutant each released a colorway and both had a small allocation of the stunning gold foil version that left us speechless and blinded.
When you look at the body of work for this year, and it’s certainly possible we missed one, it’s clear Taylor is well deserving of the artist of the year distinction and we’ did not even get into his music related prints, as there were many of those as well. That’s not to say the other artists mentioned weren’t deserving, they all were, but it’s hard to argue with the overall level of quality and quantity of works Matt Taylor produced, that is why he is our Poster Pirate 2024 artist of the year. Tomorrow we’ll be revealing our poster of the year, so be sure to check back and see what poster we could not stop thinking about this year. Have a great New Year’s eve.