Who is Steven Rhodes
Steven Rhodes is a Brisbane-based graphic artist and illustrator best known for retro horror art that looks like it was lifted straight from a 1970s children's book, then quietly pushed somewhere darker. If you have seen a vintage-style illustration of cheerful kids doing something faintly sinister and wondered who made it, that is his work. He builds faux book covers and mock educational posters in a warm, faded seventies palette, pairs them with morbid or occult themes, and lets the gap between the wholesome style and the unsettling subject do the joke.
His signature look is often called the Sinister Seventies. The reference points are the things a lot of people grew up with: Scholastic book fair catalogues, dog-eared early readers, the woodgrain and muted colour of old paperbacks, the flat friendly figures of mid-century educational art. Rhodes takes that visual language and writes new captions for it. The format is familiar enough that your eye reads it as nostalgic before your brain catches the punchline.
The style: where the Sinister Seventies comes from
If you are trying to place why the art feels instantly recognisable, it comes down to a few consistent choices. The colour is warm and slightly washed out, like a print that has aged on a shelf. The linework is clean and flat, the way mid-century instructional art was. The characters are friendly and simply drawn. And the subject is almost always something occult, morbid, or quietly grim, delivered with complete sincerity.
That mix is deliberate. Rhodes has described the Sinister Seventies as coming out of a dual love of seventies and eighties nostalgia and pitch-black humour, rather than any real interest in the dark arts. The nostalgia is the hook and the darkness is the turn, and the designs work because both halves are committed to fully. He has talked about enjoying themes that are meant to sound wholesome or motivational, then reading them a little too literally, in the spirit of the deadpan turn Gary Larson used in The Far Side.
Let's Sacrifice Toby and how the joke works
Let's Sacrifice Toby is one of his most recognised designs and a clean example of the whole approach. A group of round-faced children gather together, drawn with the same earnest tone an old activity book would use to teach you how to plant a seed or make a friendship bracelet, except the activity here is sacrificing their friend Toby. Nothing in the illustration is frightening on its own. The humour sits entirely in the caption and the context, which is the engine behind most of his work.
That pattern runs through the rest of the catalogue. A design takes something that is supposed to read as wholesome or instructional, then follows it one step further than it should go. The titles do a lot of the work, which is why so many of them land as a quiet double take rather than a shock.
My Little Occult Book Club
In 2020 Rhodes released My Little Occult Book Club through Chronicle Books, which is the most complete expression of the idea. It is built as a parody of those vintage subscription book catalogues, the ones that arrived at school and that you would pore over deciding how to spend your pocket money. Inside are faux titles framed as a real catalogue, short fake blurbs, activity pages, and mock mail-order offers for gifts like a cursed videocassette.
The joke holds across a whole book because the format is so faithful. Connect-the-dots puzzles resolve into something they probably should not. Author names hide groan-worthy puns. It reads as a love letter to a very specific kind of childhood print culture, told by someone who clearly spent a lot of time with the originals. For anyone who found his single designs funny, the book is the same sensibility given room to breathe.
Why the art resonates
A lot of the appeal is generational. The people who respond hardest to Rhodes tend to be the ones who actually remember Scholastic catalogues, woodgrain televisions, and the back-page adverts in old comics promising x-ray glasses. The art rewards that memory, then complicates it. It is nostalgia with a raised eyebrow, which is a comfortable place for a lot of people to sit.
It also helps that the humour is dark without being mean. The designs are morbid in subject but light in tone, and they tend to read as playful rather than edgy for its own sake. That is a narrow line to walk, and walking it consistently is most of what makes the work his.
Where to find his work in Australia
Because Rhodes is Australian, there is a fair amount of his artwork floating around on print-on-demand sites, and not all of it is authorised. We are an officially licensed stockist of his designs, which means the art is authentic and Rhodes is properly paid for it rather than getting nothing from a bootleg copy. Everything is printed to order in our Sydney studio on AS Colour blanks, so it is locally made rather than imported.
If his style is your kind of thing, you can see the designs we carry on our Steven Rhodes collection. It is a good place to start if you came here through one image and want to see the rest of the catalogue in the same vein.
