Green Day ‘Kerplunk’ action figure announced

A new Green Day action figure has been announced. It’s inspired by the cover art from their classic second album Kerplunk, and available for pre-order now in the BV shop, along with more Green Day vinyl and merch.

The “Kerplunk girl” was created by Chris Appelgren and Pat Hynes, and based on a story from Lookout! Records founder Larry Livermore. “I came up with the concept of the girl with the smoking gun,” Livermore told Riot Fest in a 2021 interview. “I can come up with ideas and relay them to an artist, but I can’t draw at all. I went to Chris Appelgren, one of my main co-conspirators at Lookout!, and told him what I was envisioning. He drew it, but it wasn’t quite right yet, so he drew it again, and everybody said, ‘Yeah, that looks cool, but she looks too much like Chris’s girlfriend,’ which she did. The third time he drew it, that’s the cover that became famous and is now on a whole lot of t-shirts.”

“The whole idea for the album cover actually came out of the story that’s on the inside of the album, ‘My Adventure with Green Day by Laurie L.,” Livermore continued. “And that story was influenced by this mentality that was happening in the punk scene in the early 90’s. At that time, Green Day were starting to get a little bit popular. A lot of the punks were making fun of them and picking on them because girls, especially young high school girls, (as if that’s something terrible) had started coming up to the front and dancing and loving the band. The mean punk boys decided that Green Day weren’t punk anymore, and they couldn’t like them.”

Livermore continued to Riot Fest:

The cover art was a way of saying punk girls are here, and they’re playing their part now. I wrote the story of Laurie L. to mock that whole mindset. It was originally published in a fanzine called “Tales of Blargh,” published by a punk named Janelle, who was only in her mid-teens at that time. She first showed up at 924 Gilman when she was 12. She was cool and tough and definitely not your average teenybopper. She’s partly responsible for inspiring that story, both by being a cool girl but also by asking me to do that story, which I just kind of tossed off in an afternoon.

“The gun in the girl’s hand on the cover of Kerplunk! is really aimed at macho sexism, not at any individual punk boy,” Livermore added. “Lookout! was about that all along.” Read the full interview via Riot Fest.

Kerplunk made our list of 10 Must-Have Lookout! Records, where Andrew wrote about it:

Green Day may be a full-on arena rock band with a Broadway show who haven’t released great music in years, but their first four albums were some of the best — and certainly some of the most influential — to come out of the entire ’90s pop punk boom. They may have taken over the world with major label debut Dookie, but they had already perfected their sound two years earlier on Kerplunk. Maybe it’s just because I’m tired of hearing Dookie‘s hits, but Kerplunk holds up way better (as does Dookie‘s tighter, sharper, and slightly darker followup Insomniac). The songwriting is more accomplished on Kerplunk than on their debut, and it’s a much more consistent album from start to finish (only joke song “Dominated Love Slave” breaks its reign of all hits). It’s the first home of “Welcome to Paradise,” which of course became an even bigger smash when it was re-recorded for Dookie, but other than a bigger production budget, the Dookie version is more a repeat than an improvement. On Kerplunk, Green Day proved they could keep one foot in punk’s underground and still write hits.

There’s honestly a good case to be made that “Welcome to Paradise” is Green Day’s best single — it’s withstood being outplayed to death a lot better than “When I Come Around” and “Brain Stew” and “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” and certainly better than anything on American Idiot — but even today, it never overshadows the rest of Kerplunk. “2000 Light Years Away” and “One of My Lies” probably could have gotten as big with the right push from radio and MTV. “No One Knows” and “Christie Road” (the latter of which is almost proto-emo) showed Green Day could write non-cheesy ballads years before they got rich with cheesy ones. Just about every song on the album has a chorus that proved Billie Joe Armstrong could write a better melody than most of his less famous peers (even if a lot of those peers were harder and faster). The way Green Day straddled the line between their punk roots and their pop ambitions in 1992 feels a lot like the way bands like Beach Slang, Joyce Manor, PUP and Modern Baseball are doing it now. It feels safe to say those bands learned a thing or two from Kerplunk.

Stream Kerplunk below, and see what else made the list here.

Never shy about getting political, Green Day recently spoke out about ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis at their first show of the year. They’re playing the Super Bowl’s opening ceremony on Sunday, which is their only upcoming show at the moment. Stay tuned.