Liquid Swords

GZA built the Liquid Swords cover around his love of chess. His concept was a chessboard where the pieces are sword-wielding warriors locked in battle, a fusion of chess strategy and the kung fu films that run through the Wu-Tang Clan's music.

To draw it, GZA's manager Geoffrey L. Garfield commissioned Denys Cowan, the comic book artist who founded Milestone Media. Cowan's black-and-white line art was inked by Prentis Rollins and coloured digitally by Jason Scott Jones, Milestone's colour editor, and the work was supervised through GZA GrafX, a company owned by GZA and Garfield.

Wu-Tang DJ Mathematics adapted the group's famous W logo into a G for GZA. The result looks like the cover of a comic book, a style that matched the album's cinematic tone. Liquid Swords was released by Geffen on 7 November 1995.