HODL! The Album

Ordinarily I dislike having to explain my work, but in the case of this Beatles parody, a little bit of explanation is in order.

While doing research for this piece, I discovered that the original HELP! album cover photo that everyone is familiar with does not, in fact, spell “HELP.” It actually nonsensically spells “NUJV,” but everyone just assumed that the flag semaphore alphabet they were purportedly alluding to was correct.

The intention was definitely to spell “HELP” but upon shooting images of the band, the photographer realized that the arm positions for those letters didn’t look very good visually. So instead, the band posed in more visually appealing positions, which unfortunately didn’t spell anything.

(In the case of our HODL cartoon, I did actually draw the arm positions in the correct places, following the flag semaphore alphabet.)