It’s been a minute since I’ve hand-drawn a cover, and this was a fun one to work on. Our food critic Ron Bechtol visited several local restaurants in search of perfect pork. I wanted to keep the cover light and fun (so as not to offend our veggie/vegan/kosher readership) and pigs are kind of genetically engineered to be silly-looking anyway. Also: never made the logo out of sausage before, so this is kind of a milestone. (Cough.)

This week is the Current‘s 2012 Best of San Antonio issue — my sixth BOSA edition as Art Director. This year’s theme was “The End of the World” — in addition to more than 150 readers’ poll winners, we had photog Josh Huskin shoot post-apocalyptic scenes with model Hillary Swindell. (Also: Lawrence Mercado of Not Bot FX contributed make-up and props for the shoots.) I had envisioned a genre mash-up of pulp/grindhouse/sci-fi, inspired by apocalyptic film badasses such as Escape from New York‘s Snake Plissken and Sarah Connor from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. At 196 pages, this is the largest Current ever produced and took a lot of teamwork and long hours to put together. But the end result is totally worth it. Contrary to the cover tag, this is not really the last Best of SA issue ever — but it’ll be hard to top this one.

(And if the world does actually end, at least we’ll be going out on a high note.)

This week’s Current is devoted to local music — and SA band Pop Pistol graces the cover this year for being voted Best Indie Rock Band. For this shoot, I thought it would be fun for them to interact with the cover type, so I cut out the words by hand and photog Josh Huskin took care of the rest. I think it’s a lot of fun, and while the winners list always draws mixed emotions (sample comment: “This city sucks balls. That’s why most of the bands on this list are shitty”), I think anything that provokes any kind of reaction from our sometimes-too-apathetic city is better than no reaction at all. I personally like enjoy the music of several bands that did well on the list, and it also showed me a few that I’d never heard before but am now eager to check out. So congratulations to the winners of our little popularity contest … we’ll see you ’round the clubs.

Our friends from Pennsylvania, Toy Soldiers, are here in Texas for SXSW and playing a quick SA show with my band We Leave at Midnight (now on Spotify!) and another band I play with, Black Magic and the Full Exposé. BMATFE is led by Alex Wash, who lends his considerable piano talents to my primary band, Bad Breaks. I’m really pleased with how the poster came out — I wanted to work in the state of Pennsylvania somehow, and the flag solution is almost subliminal. Looking forward to this show, should be a good one. Here’s a video of Toy Soldiers: