Surfboards and surf accessories

Surfing, skating, and rock and roll: What more does a young man need? Mix those passions with a love of comic books, add a discerning eye and a talented hand, and you’ve got a rare artist whose resume spans half a century. His name is Jim Phillips.

In July, Schiffer Publishing released its third gathering of Phillips’s work, The Skateboard Art of Jim Phillips, an exhaustive scrapbook retrospective cobbled together by the artist himself. The 208-page soft-cover book is also laced with Phillips’ autobiographical narrative that begins in 1955 in Santa Cruz, California, where he and his buddies hammered together orange-crate skate scooters. Soon enough as the story goes, the crate god left out of the equation, and they dubbed their streamlined version of a “bun board” (not because they rode it sitting down, but because riding it invariably meant falling on your ass).