Rockin' Jelly Bean

Nobody has confirmed Rockin' Jelly Bean's real name. He's never appeared in public without a luchador wrestling mask, a choice he's linked in interviews to a motorcycle accident, and after three decades of interviews, gallery shows, and brand collaborations, that's still the only face anyone's ever seen.

RJB started out in Tokyo around 1990, not as a fine artist but as the guy drawing gig flyers and record covers for his own surf-rock band, Jackie and the Cedrics, a group he still plays in today. His visual style pulls hard from American lowbrow and Kustom Kulture, Ed Big Daddy Roth's hot rod cartoons, Robert Williams, R. Crumb, filtered through a Japanese kid's lens on 60s and 70s American pop culture, and layered with the influence of manga legends Osamu Tezuka and Go Nagai. The result is unmistakable: pin-up women rendered with exaggerated, cartoonish extremes, played for spectacle and dark humor at once.

He relocated to LA in the late 90s and launched his first wearable line, EROSTY POP, before friends opened EROSTIKA, the Harajuku shop and gallery that now carries his name and catalog. From there the collaborations stacked up fast: a Neon Genesis Evangelion 2.0 t-shirt in 2010, a Mondo silkscreen poster for Kill Bill in 2013, work with RAW rolling papers, Vans, and Medicom Toy, plus poster art for cult films and music festivals going back decades.

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