The first symbol I made was a white rocket twisting impossibly into two parabolas, which would form a circle, as a gesture both to the rainbow as two halves of a parabola and to the book's ouroboros references (a snake biting its own tail; instead I used two “snakes”). The warped shape would also remind readers of the physical impossibilities in the Gravity’s Rainbow world. I also took some inspiration from Frank Miller’s use of a white phallic symbol dominating the darker space on the cover, which I think plays very well into the racial themes of the novel and also alludes to its sexual encounters. 

The rainbow around the rocket-ouroboros is what a rainbow would look like without the natural green and violet colors, which are sucked and distorted into the center rockets. The contrast between the natural colors of the rainbow and the synthetic, psychedelic version of normal green and purple (lime green and magenta) speak to the themes in the book involving natural vs. manmade, and science vs. nature.

The four colors in the rainbow are also directly taken from the Marvel comic book palette, a nod to Pynchon’s love of and references to comic books. The background (which is actually a dark shade of gray, rather than absolute black) alludes to the darkness of wartime, literally and metaphorically, and I purposefully left the center of the cover blank, to give the viewer the impression of emptiness, loneliness, and confusion. I hoped to suggest imagery of whirlpools (Charybdis, the obstacle Odysseus had to face on his journey), labyrinths, and colorful mandalas—all important and significant symbols—with the design, as well as a psychedelic eye, alluding to drug use in the ‘60s—representing the book’s self-awareness and desire to elevate itself—and a screaming mouth, again suggesting paranoia.

I experimented with glitch art as well, running images through a random processing program that takes its raw data and repeats certain sections; each time I refresh the program, the image is a distorted in a different way. Some of these forays into glitching (such as Img. 1) yielded aesthetically interesting results, but I felt that the glitch art ultimately compromised the strength of the symbolism on the front cover. I really loved the idea of how the process of glitch art itself represented the theme of randomness versus planned intention in Gravity’s Rainbow, and wanted to include it somewhere, which is how the back of the cover was conceptualized. I decided to use the Tower tarot card not only because Pynchon himself wanted the Tower on the cover of Gravity’s Rainbow but also because it seems to hold a special significance because it is a symbol of the multifaceted nature of the novel: 

It is a puzzling card, and everybody has a different story on it. It shows a bolt of lightning striking a tall phallic structure, and two figures, one wearing a crown, falling from it. Some read ejaculation, and leave it at that. Others see a Gnostic or Cathar symbol for the Church of Rome, and this is generalized to mean any System which cannot tolerate heresy: a system which, by its nature, must sooner or later fall. We know by now that it is also the Rocket. (762)

But I was taken away: driven in a Hispano-Suiza with Blicero himself, out through the gray weather to a petrochemical plant that for days had stalked us in a wheel at our horizon, black and broken towers in the distance, clustered together, a flame that always burned at the top of one stack. (494)