The Misfits Piast Club Poster

A monumental piece of East Coast hardcore iconography. This large-format hand-screened butcher-paper poster showcases the night The Misfits tore through The Piast Club in Jersey City, New Jersey, with Gang Green and the Nihilistics on December 10, 1982 — a date along The Misfits Evilive Tour. The artwork is by Pushead (Brian Schroeder), and only very few examples are known to have surfaced. The poster was produced by someone working inside the Misfits' immediate New Jersey ecosystem, and the venue is deliberately omitted from the artwork — almost certainly because the same sheet was meant to do duty for multiple dates along the run. Some surviving copies are hand-colored; this one is clean. The Boise-born artist's skull-and-bone vernacular would soon migrate from butcher paper onto Metallica sleeves and three generations of t-shirts, but in December 1982 it was still hardcore's secret handshake. Posters of this scale, on this paper, surviving from this run — most were stapled to telephone poles and lost to the weather within days of the gig — are vanishingly rare.