The new World Industries Heritage Collection lands like a time machine with grip tape on the bottom, bringing back two graphics that still feel loud enough to get grounded for. The Jeremy Klein Black Eye Kid Slick Bottom from 1991 and Rodney Mullen Rock Is King from 1992 are not just reissue decks, they are snapshots from one of skateboarding’s most unhinged creative eras. Both graphics came from Marc McKee, the artist who helped turn early ’90s skateboard art into something sharper, funnier, weirder, and way more dangerous than the skull-and-flame formula that had dominated the decade before.
World Industries was born from disruption. Founded by Steve Rocco and Rodney Mullen in the late 1980s, the company became one of the first major skateboard brands run by professional skateboarders instead of outside business people. That mattered. World did not behave like the old guard, and it did not want to. Rocco’s attitude was confrontational, funny, reckless, and brilliant all at once, while Mullen brought deep technical credibility and a skater’s understanding of how boards actually needed to evolve. Together, they helped push skateboarding into the street era, when smaller wheels, double kicks, technical tricks, and rider-owned brands started rewriting the rulebook.
The Jeremy Klein Black Eye Kid Slick Bottom captures that World Industries spirit perfectly. Originally released in 1991 with artwork by Marc McKee, the graphic has that unforgettable early ’90s mix of humour, attitude, and bold visual storytelling. A young kid sits with red sneakers, a folded paper, and an expression that instantly pulls you into the scene, giving the deck a mischievous cartoon energy without losing its collector appeal. It is classic McKee: clean illustration, sharp character work, and a memorable concept that still stands out decades later. The slick bottom construction adds even more early ’90s flavour, bringing back the era when skaters were chasing faster slides, louder graphics, and anything that felt more rebellious than a standard wood-bottom deck.
Jeremy Klein was the right rider for a graphic like this. Coming out of the late ’80s and early ’90s street explosion, Klein became known for fast, stylish, technical skating and later went on to become a major creative force in skateboarding through Birdhouse and Hook-Ups. Before the anime graphics and cult collector status of his later work, Klein’s World Industries years put him right inside the Rocco-era shift, where pros were not just riders, they were personalities, provocateurs, and part of the brand’s mythology. The Black Eye Kid fits that world beautifully: cheeky, nasty, memorable, and impossible to confuse with anything safe.
The Rodney Mullen Rock Is King deck is another kind of beast entirely. Originally released in 1992 and illustrated by Marc McKee, the graphic throws Mullen into full rock-god absurdity, with a crowned skeleton shredding a flying-V guitar under lightning and flames. It is bright, ridiculous, and totally perfect. By this point, Mullen was no longer just the freestyle wizard who had changed flatground skating forever; he was becoming a bridge between freestyle precision and modern street skating. His trick vocabulary, from kickflips and impossible variations to countless flatground innovations, became part of the foundation that street skating still stands on.
Rodney Mullen’s role in World Industries cannot be overstated. He was not only a founding force behind the company, he was also one of the most important technical skateboarders of all time. World arrived during a period when freestyle was fading from the mainstream and street skating was taking over. Mullen’s genius was that he could translate freestyle’s impossible board control into the language of street. That transition helped reshape what skaters thought was possible, and World gave him a platform that was strange, rebellious, and smart enough to understand that skateboarding’s future was going to be built by the riders themselves.
Marc McKee was the visual engine behind so much of that chaos. His work for World Industries, Blind, and the wider Rocco family of brands helped define a new graphic language for skateboarding. Instead of making every deck look like heavy metal album art or gothic horror, McKee brought cartoons, satire, parody, bad behaviour, and pop-culture troublemaking into the mix. His graphics were funny, offensive to the right people, collectible before people knew they were collecting, and often instantly recognizable from across the shop. His own archive lists Rodney Mullen’s Rock Is King as a 1992 World Industries graphic, sitting among a deep catalogue of era-defining work.
That is what makes these reissues hit so hard. They are not polished museum pieces pretending skateboarding was tidy. They are reminders that early World Industries was messy, smart, bratty, and completely necessary. The Black Eye Kid and Rock Is King decks come from a moment when skateboard companies were learning that graphics could be jokes, arguments, insults, stories, and cultural grenades all at once. McKee’s art gave World a voice that was impossible to ignore, while riders like Rodney Mullen and Jeremy Klein gave the brand real skate credibility under all the noise.
The Heritage Collection brings that energy back without sanding off the weird edges. For collectors, these are two essential World Industries-era graphics from one of skateboarding’s most collectible periods. For skaters, they are a reminder of when board art felt dangerous, funny, and personal. For anyone who missed the slick-bottom, small-wheel, big-attitude era the first time around, this is a rare chance to grab a piece of the moment when World Industries helped drag skateboarding into the modern street age, one bad joke and one legendary pro model at a time. These World Industries Heritage Collection reissues are more than throwbacks; they are loud, colourful pieces of skate history.
