""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.""
A Kerplunk-inspired Green Day action figure modeled on the album's cover art is available for pre-order from the BV shop, alongside additional Green Day vinyl and merchandise. The Kerplunk girl image was created by Chris Appelgren and Pat Hynes and drew from a story by Larry Livermore. Livermore conceived the smoking-gun girl and relayed the idea to Appelgren, who refined the drawing through multiple iterations until the final design was chosen and reproduced widely on t-shirts. The cover concept originated from the interior story "My Adventure with Green Day by Laurie L.," and served as a response to punk-scene backlash against young female fans; the story first appeared in the fanzine "Tales of Blargh," published by a teenager named Janelle who attended 924 Gilman.
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