Here's the cover of the current issue of the New Yorker. This was one of those quick turnaround things. B Stauffer, M Ulriksen , Marcellus , Staake, Steve Brodner and others have been around this block before (Barry Blitt built the damn block) and have provided great, informative posts. Risking redundancy, here's little bit more about how these things happen . Last Wednesday afternoon, The New Yorker cover Art Director , Francoise Mouly, put out the word that the magazine was looking for an Anthony Wiener image . This message goes out as an e mail to a large group of contributors , I don't know how many, but it's a depressingly daunting number I'm sure - I hope I never actually learn that number. Mr. Wiener may wind up being the Mayor of New York City, but at this point, it's hard to deny that he is also a walking dick joke. For a cartoonist, he is an embarrassment of riches (or a richness of embarrassments). As a subject of satire, the man is a target-rich environment. Still, it's a challenge to come up with something that might embody the low and high standards of the subject and the client respectively. Anyhow, the sketches are requested within a couple of hours. Despite the ripe subject matter, it is at this point, I think, that the artist (or me, at least) must try and conjure up, and inhabit, a contradictory combination of optimism and hubris crossed with the sober pragmatism of a person who understands the hideous odds against anything good resulting from his or her best efforts in the next ninety minutes. One throws his hat in the ring with the lucid resignation of somebody who can say; fuck it, it's just a hat. An hour later, Francoise winnows down the submissions to a couple of prospective candidates and sends these on to the Editor, David Remnick. (In this case the illustrators still standing were told that our stuff had made the final cut, and we're advised to not wander too far from the drawing table and to postpone any happy hour plans). A final decision was made pretty quickly, and after a request from Francoise to keep things bright and to make the sky "anything but blue", coffee is re-heated and drawing commences. It's around 9:00. In what I guess amounts to an F. Mouly pep talk (really, a kind effort to relieve my anxiety), Francoise advised that, while drawing, I should repeat to myself over and over - "this will probably never ever run". Weirdly, this actually kind of works. 'Finished up the next morning just as the courier arrived to take the final into the city. I've not seen the actual magazine yet, but the online cover has been around. Below is the very quick sketch, one of three submitted.