Bernard Madoff and Rod Blagojevich have been having a shit time of it in the press lately, but in fairness, we’ve had it worse. To say nothing of both scandals’ awful timing, the economic downturn has actually prompted a shift in current cultural interests that some suggest has diverted our attention away from pop culture sex scandals to those that involve financiers instead. For the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, now marginalized in the press, this is indeed a crushing blow in the wake of an already cruel, cruel year.

The above illustration placing Bernie and Rod as the prime focus of our new, modern lynch mobs was done for the New York Times’ Week in Review. Art direction by Aviva Michaelov.

The other two comps that didn’t make the cut are below. FYI, the typography on the right hand side of the NYT detail above was done by the frighteningly talented Jessica Hische.

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I recently received word that my uncommissioned ‘Loudmouth’ piece won a silver f#%king medal from the Society of Illustrators for their Illustrators 51 competition. What followed was a peculiar sensation of luck, gratitude and the sneaky feeling that 1,000,000 wildly talented artists working out and about in the ether were a whole lot more deserving of such a thing than me. I will likely celebrate this news by sealing myself up in the crawlspace we call a studio in the apartment and continue to scrape away on more self-initiated, nonsensical projects to keep my brain distracted and my body away from the couch.

I’d like to thank the academy.

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Roy Blount Jr.’s ‘Alphabet Juice’ is essentially a literary manual dissecting as many of our language’s oddball behaviors as the author can wrangle (and he can wrangle quite a bit). As this was an illustration for a piece that ran in the Book Review, I wanted to find a solution using only type that would encourage the reader to sound everything out aloud as the reader “read” the image.

The two additional type experiments that didn’t quite make the grade are posted below. Making people talk out loud using only a picture is simply not an easy thing to do.

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Above is an illustration I did accompanying an Op/Ed article in the New York Times that ran a day before the election. The article is written by two economic specialists with vastly different world views finding some common ground in what they propose many of the government’s economic policies should be going forward with whomever (at the time) turned out to be the victor of the election. My process of late has been more labored and precious than I’d like it to be, so it was extremely cool of Leanne Shapton, the page’s art director, to give me the room to play faster and looser than I typically do.

Ecstatic as I was when Obama locked the job down, any one man who actively seeks to assume responsibility for our current economy as well as our two wars has to be a little bit sick in the head. Godspeed, Mr. President-Elect.

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That was f%#king awesome. Thank you to all who could make it.

Here’s our invite, printed by the fine folks at Kayrock in Williamsburg.

We went to Texas shortly afterwards just to chill out for a few days. Things got WEIRD in Texas.

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I contributed an illustration to the Nov/Dec issue of Mother Jones for an article chronicling some of the most notorious examples of individuals and groups attempting to disenfranchise voters during recent election years. A good bit of attention has been devoted to ACORN in the press recently and while it’s fully worthy of exploration, the infractions committed by them could be considered quaint compared to some of the epic scumbaggery accounted for here, and it doesn’t bode so well for the next few weeks either.

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This is an illustration I just completed for the 16.11 issue of WIRED. The article it corresponds to explores a devoted and diehard tribe of overseas programmers who add subtitles to U.S. television shows like Gossip Girl into their respective native tongues and post them for downloading on BitTorrent for free.

This is not anyone’s job. There is no money exchanged for this service. It’s just their particular hobby. The sheer blinding spectacularity of Gossip Girl, Everybody Loves Raymond, Prison Break and countless other US TV shows demand that the devoted few translate, compress and upload these suckers quickly in order to satiate the needs and desires of the rabid non-English speaking public outside the U.S.

Service and duty manifest themselves in ways we simply cannot know until devotion like this is demonstrated for us all to see.

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This is a portrait of Pat O’Malley that I recently completed for Cleveland Magazine. Pat O’Malley was, until recently, a county recorder and Democratic Party power broker in Cleveland. Employing a spectacular lack of restraint, the depths of his multi-tasking stretched out further to include additional civic enrichment such as public brawling, an FBI investigation, and one particularly sinister toolbox. Remember how the national media went insane covering the fall of Eliot Spitzer? O’Malley should thank the stars that he didn’t work in New York. His story is, to borrow a phrase, “bonkers.”

Jen Kessen, the art director at Cleveland Mag, did a great job on the feature spread which can be viewed here.

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Andrew Bacevich’s new book, The Limits of Power, reviewed this past week in the Times’ Book Review, postulates that modern America’s concept of ‘freedom’ has been slowly and steadily confused with ideas of consumption and gluttony. The argument in the book is tied largely to prime examples from the Bush Administration’s foreign policy of the past 7.5 years. It reads like an obvious but necessary point.

Nicholas Blechman actually volunteered to typeset the page around the illustration of the balloon when this idea proved to be the winner among the batch that I sent him for the accompanying illustration. Nicholas Blechman is freakin’ awesome.

Additional sketches that were submitted are below:

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This one required a delicate conversation. The Times’ Science section ran this article a few days ago observing how the field of urology, long dominated by men, has been gaining a more substantial amount of female doctors in recent years. This can make for a somewhat uncomfortable doctor-patient relationship with regards to women touching men’s private parts in a doctor’s office.

Therese Schecter, the art director on this piece, was already close to giggling when she called me to take a crack at it the previous week. It was important to her that it strike just such a balance of humor without heading into pee joke territory or something more substantially gory.

While a stethescope-as-zipper-fly and the modern man’s need for Viagara (pictured below) were considered noble attempts by the brass, nothing quite sold the tragicomic dread of the doctor’s office as the snap of those rubber gloves being befitted by a woman’s hands. Working on this yielded many chortles and cackles, but only because I have been spared the urologist’s waiting room as of late.

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The poster design I submitted for AIGA’s Get Out the Vote campaign for this fall was one of 23 others selected from a group of over 200 submissions to be professionally printed and distributed around the country to encourage non-partisan voter awareness. The posters are pasted up in storefronts, laundromats, restaurants, dorms and basically any other public place around the country that might have a window. They were also projected at both the Denver Art Museum and Walker Art Center in Minneapolis during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions a short while back. My poster above displays the word ‘Vote’ composed with a microscopic litany of excuses people might use to get out of voting on Election Day.

Given the mile-high snowdrift of gorgeous and inspiring design work that was submitted in the name of voting during this competition, the words ‘honored’ and ‘Really?! Are you sure you mean mine?’ can’t really lend my sentiments an accurate measure. I’m legitimately stunned that mine was selected among so much other, what I consider superior, patriotic ass-kickery. Given that the majority of the others that were chosen were designed by more than a few heroes of mine (SpotCo, Rick Valicenti and Ellen freakin’ Lupton among them), I’m a little bit excited.

Brain = EXPLODED.

A detail of my poster that you might actually be able to read is just below and here’s a gallery slideshow of the other 23 posters that were selected for distribution. Genuinely great work all around.

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This is a piece I recently completed for the DollyPop exhibit at the World of Wonder Storefront Gallery in LA. It’s a group show celebrating the mercurial Ms. Parton as a performer, philanthropist, survivor and unlikely champion of the Great American Experiment. My original idea to celebrate her philanthropy was swiftly derailed on the subway one evening when my future wife Jill suggested this knockout idea of having her hair serve as manna from heaven to the poor and disenfranchised children that she’s helped over the years.

My friends (and fellow Mammals) Ben Marra, Devin Clark and Tom Forget all have pieces in the show as well, which puts me in some fine, fine company. Details of Manna from Dolly are below:

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