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“Flame Rite has created portable art, simply beautiful both in form and function. But it is muscle bound, tattooed art inspired by fifties and graffiti art pulled up from the underground of a burgeoning scene of comic books, rock posters and street art and it’s in your face. For Scorched Art, Hazelmyer has brought collaborators and new artists together to design the best in lighter art. The images are beautifully transferred to the page with depth of colour that demonstrates the ability of a tiny object to become more than a miniature billboard for corporate logos. Hazelmyer has solid design credentials from record sleeves, posters, t-shirts and matchbooks, and as an art form Flame Rite have created a nice chunk of metallic apple pie.”
— Bookmunch

“You’ve smoked your last cigarette, and all the corner stores are closed. Spend a long night torturing yourself through withdrawal with Scorched Art: The Incendiary Aesthetic of Flame Rite Zippos, a smokin’ new book of all of Flame Rite’s fabulous custom-art Zippo lighters over the years. If you’ve been as obsessive as the average Pez dispenser collector, maybe you’re lucky enough to have amassed a chrome mini-museum of the actual Flame Rite art lighters. But if convenience and cost efficiency are your first priorities, pay one flat fee for the book and view this unbeatable pocket-sized underground art collection on paper. With Robert and Suzanne Williams, R. Crumb, Coop, Von Dutch, Niagara, Ed Roth and Gary Panter all counted among the licensing artists, this is the healthiest nic fix you’ll ever get.”
— Juxtapoz

“Founder of the noise rock label Amphetamine Reptile back when ‘indie’ actually meant something, Hazelmyer was a Zippo collector who was tired of designs that were no more challenging than ‘your average greeting card.’ The famed lighters have been icons of smoker cool since the 1930s, but were first logo-ed 20 years later, but by the early ’90s they had, in Hazelmyer’s view, become staid. He thus ‘scoured the art underworld for all that was amazing and started slapping it on a Zippo’ – drawing heavily on the burgeoning indie comics scene for talent. Under the name Flame Rite (after being sued as ‘Smoke King’), designs from Peter Bagge, Shepard Fairey (creator of the ubiquitous ‘Andre the Giant has a posse’ tags) and R. Crumb appeared in the early years; altogether, Hazelmyer has gathered 35 artists from the last decade. The smooth page design has a 1950s-tinged, slickly lurid feel. Shades of blue, orange and yellow are the backdrop for each Zippo, annotated with the name of its artist and date of creation. No artist bios are included, but there is a bibliography of Web sites for each designer.”
— Publishers Weekly