Cheney Trumps New Orleans?

I'm usually a fan of the cover illustrations for The New Yorker. When you're scanning hundreds of magazines at Borders, the typical close-up photographic portraits and nondescript graphics blend together like grazing zebras. It's a welcome relief when your eyes land on a colorful, witty illustration that slyly satirizes a recent event or general idea. There's something both charmingly sophisticated and coffeeshop cool about using cover art the way The New Yorker does.

So I was disappointed when I came upon the news (via The Millions) that the magazine had bumped a beautiful and touching rendering of New Orleans:



Instead, they used a trendy, unoriginal joke about Dick Cheney's hunting mishap:



According to the artist, Bill Joyce, the magazine had approached him, a Louisiana native who still lives there, to do both a cover illustration and a story about New Orleans post-Katrina. The editors then decided to go with the Cheney story, not only replacing Joyce's cover but also completely dropping his story as well.

There are many reasons why they may have dropped his story. They did feature other New Orleans-related content in that issue and his story may have been redundant. Or, quite simply, it may not have been well-written. Since we can't read it and weren't privy to the editors' discussions, there's know way of knowing.

We can see, however, the cover they rejected and its unimpressive replacement.

By the time this issue hit the stands, the hunting story had already been written about, blogged about and talked about everywhere, from network news to late-night talk shows to online editorials everywhere. The New Yorker, jumping on the political bandwagon a little late, would hopefully have a new perspective worthy of their cover. By using a bland Brokeback Mountain reference, they proved that they don't.

While this isn't a terrible cover (out of context, it's almost kind of funny), it does feel dated and, worse, uncreative. How come a highly esteemed publication such as The New Yorker can only think to make yet another Brokeback Mountain reference/joke? There's already been about, oh, three million Brokeback jokes made in the media, from late-night monologues to dozens of homemade parodies. Plus, as this blog explains, the magazine already did a Cheney-and-Bush-as-gay-lovers cover a few months ago. Expired, over-saturated topic + expired, over-saturated cover = an oversight on the part of the editors.

Conversely, Joyce's boldly colorful cover manages to be both haunting and hopeful, conveying pride in the face of disaster.

As Joyce himself says, "I really had hoped that compassion would win out over clever. Mr. Cheney's friend is thankfully alive. Meanwhile, we're still finding bodies in New Orleans."