I’m ashamed to say that as of this writing, I may be the sole individual on earth over the age of 25 who hasn’t yet had their reading time fully consumed by Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. Given the frequency with which which American popular culture gloms itself onto pro-feminist deceased authors from Sweden, these books are freakin’ popular. Having not read any of the books yet, I was marginally proud of myself for not having any of the stories spoiled for me by anyone, but that ended fairly abruptly when I was asked to do the cover of the Book Review for their lead review for Larsson’s final posthumous work, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, (which as you may or may not have noticed, has received just the slightest bit of press in the past few weeks).

David Kamp warns any potential newbies to the trilogy very early on in his review that it’s near impossible to discuss the events of the third book without giving a quick and dirty breakdown of the plots from the previous two, so despite my best efforts to carve out some time to go into these books pure—I was thwarted by the opportunity to make a bunch of pictures.

The review splits time between discussing the trio of books as a publishing phenomenon in the first half and the particulars of the Hornet’s Nest volume in the latter. Because of this, the comps I submitted volleyed back and forth between those two poles in the hopes that something would stick. Two of my six fallen soldiers are below:

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Nicholas Blechman was travelling when this came along, so the art directorial reigns were governed by the notorious Kim Bost on this one.

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A whole slew of oncologists and clinical researchers chime in on the NYT Letters section in response to their recent editorial which explained why current funding for U.S. cancer research is in arrears and what can be done to help correct it.

Art direction: Kim Bost

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Earlier this month, Congressman Patrick McHenry introduced new legislation proposing to place Ronald Reagan on the $50 bill and thereby removing its longtime current resident, Ulysses S. Grant.

Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton and author of a book on Reagan, has a huge problem with this. In his op/ed for the 3/13 Sunday Times, he catalogs an impressive laundry list of Grant’s accomplishments that he feels that popular history has largely neglected.

In building an illustration for this, the thing that was deemed most sensible was to have Grant, larger than life, outsizing his own frame from the 50 dollar bill and growing onward. Kim Bost, in art directing, humorously took it one step further and had the top of Grant’s hair encroaching on the headline itself. However appropriate, that’s just plain funny.

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Moreover, not being the kind of guy who walks around with multiple 50 dollar bills in his wallet, you discover some pretty amazing details up close when you’ve tasked yourself with building a collage from one of them.

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Henry Paulson Jr. feels that financial regulatory reform isn’t happening fast enough. In his op/ed today, he singles out specific items to focus on in order to better assess the market’s stability and how to best gauge any substantial risk coming from any one firm which might threaten that stability.

For the illustration on the actual page, we had to compete with a big ‘ol ad in the bottom right corner, so space was tight. Kim Bost gave me the option of doing something in a smallish-sized square or something very tall and very thin. When we landed on the money monocle as our winner among the rough drafts I submitted, she did a truly knockout job on the page.

The other rough drafts that I toyed with prior to our final are below:

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Alan Kuperman, the director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas, believes that our only remaining option to get Iran to cease enriching uranium for nuclear weapons is to bomb them.

A few readers see things a bit differently.

Art direction by Kim Bost.

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Sunday’s Op-Ed doesn’t have many kind things to say about AG Eric Holder’s re-opening of dozens of cases regarding detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay by C.I.A. employees. It’s not that the author, Joseph Finder, thinks that falsely imprisoned detainees, were that they were abused, don’t deserve justice. It’s more the reality that these cases were already exhaustively explored years ago by “hardheaded career prosecutors, unforgiving of CIA transgressions”. The re-opening of these cases is likened to political posturing and it is then suggested that using the substantial money and resources required to explore these cases one more time dilutes the efficacy of the C.I.A. while undermining a few essential principles of our government. In this situation, the more you look into something, the less you’re inclined to see.

For the final illustration, Kim Bost and I landed on the above image to drive home the suggestion of a futile, justice vs. justice scenario. The initial comps that I submitted went after the idea that looking at detainee abuse again (and for dubious reasons) will reveal less and less information about the thing that is being investigated. As such, there were many fallen soldiers for this piece, three of which are below.

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If a programmer working for Goldman Sachs makes a copy of a code that he wrote and posts it elsewhere as an example of his body of work, does it constitute stealing? Former computer programmer Michael Osinski speculates the current Goldman Sachs/Sergey Aleynikov lawsuit on the Times’ op-ed page today.

For the illustration above, Kim Bost gave me the option of providing a single large image for the top of the page or making a slightly smaller one for the top in addition to a small crawlspace for a spot illo just beneath it. With the subject revolving around theft, this second option gave us an opportunity to, in essence, steal a chunk of the image itself to bludgeon the point home. Kim’s good.

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