Junior Tomlin

Junior Tomlin (born 1960) is a British illustrator, graphic artist and comics colourist whose work helped give rave culture a distinctive visual identity. Raised in Ladbroke Grove, west London, by Jamaican parents, he developed an interest in drawing through comics, mythology and science-fiction television. He studied at Byam Shaw School of Art before entering Goldsmiths College to study graphic design in 1981.

His career connects several forms of popular visual culture. In a 2020 interview, Tomlin recalled producing his first computer-game cover for Sun Star in 1987. Teaching airbrush techniques at the London Cartoon Workshop brought him into contact with Renegade Soundwave, leading to artwork for The Phantom / Space Gladiator. Record-sleeve commissions followed for Mute, Kickin’ Records and Vinyl Solution. He dates his first rave flyer to Raveworld in 1992: three heads floating in space, an image that introduced his imaginative approach to a new audience.

Tomlin’s flyers combine saturated colour, airbrushed surfaces, strange faces and futuristic landscapes. Rather than simply illustrating a line-up, they propose a world that the event promises to open up. His clients included Telepathy, Dreamscape, Slammin’ Vinyl, One Nation, Dream Odyssey and Ravealation, alongside record labels such as React and ZTT. The nickname “the Salvador Dali of Rave” acknowledges his surreal imagery, while Afrofuturism offers another important context for the conjunction of Black cultural experience, technology and imagined futures in his work. His own AFROFUTURES exhibition in 2018 explicitly explored that territory.

The move from painted originals to digital production was also a practical decision about authorship. Tomlin recalled adopting digital tools in the mid-1990s partly because commissioned originals were not being returned: sending files enabled him to retain his artwork. His wider practice includes comics colouring for publishers including Marvel, Panini and DC, with credits encompassing Judge Dredd, Action Man and Transformers Armada. In a 2018 interview he also described making creature masks for Clive Barker’s Nightbreed and later working as a texture-map artist for AMG Effects. These connections place his rave imagery within a broader career spanning printed illustration, comics, games and screen production.

Velocity Press published Junior Tomlin: Flyer & Cover Art in 2020. His 2022 talk at South London Gallery revisited flyer culture and his designs for Peckham’s Lazerdrome. In 2024 he participated in Morley Gallery’s Generations exhibition, bringing together west London artists of the African Caribbean diaspora. This later attention recognises work originally made for circulation through record shops, club networks and everyday collecting.