Beginning with its debut issue in September 1995, The Weekly Standard has featured on its pages the work of a small army of top-notch artists, among them John Kascht, who produced many early covers—including that original cover likeness of Newt Gingrich—and who now has some 19 pieces of art in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. These two decades of artwork have given the magazine a reputation for lively illustration and inspired a steady response from readers—a mix of curiosity, praise, disgust, delight, and outrage.
Practically inclined readers sometimes ask about the nuts and bolts of pulling imagery together every week, a process that has changed utterly since 1995. When the magazine was young, all its artists worked in real ink or paint, rendering on board or canvas and usually shipping the final product to us in the mail, where it would be photographed and scanned. Today, almost all of our illustrators leave their pencils and brushes gathering cobwebs in the corner, instead using a stylus on one or another variety of touch-responsive computer screen. When done, they zip the digital file to us online within minutes.
As readers now and then discern, we do sometimes indulge an inside joke, as when we echoed Thomas Fluharty’s grim GOP-disaster cover from November 2008 (“Wipeout”) with a celebratory variation following the GOP triumph in the 2014 midterms (“Cowabunga!”). While there is no “Greatest Hits” list, some covers are hard to forget, given the response they inspired.
Gary Locke’s March 2010 cover showing an unclothed and freezing Al Gore (“The global warming campaign enters its emperor’s-new-clothes phase”) was enlarged to several feet tall and displayed on the floor of the Senate. It also generated considerable revulsion and glee among readers, a typical case of the former coming from a reader in Kentucky: “I love The Weekly Standard. However, I am bothered by the March 15 cover. It is simply childish. I have no fondness of Al Gore. Yet, there is a level of dignity and respect that should be maintained by this great publication.” The very next email message announced, “I love the Al Gore . . . cover & would love to have it on a T-shirt!”
With great regularity, we are convicted of impugning the high and mighty. A Virginia reader in 2009 objected, “Your cover picture of Caroline Kennedy is outrageously offensive—as cruel and bigoted as the liberal press’ treatment of Sarah Palin. You guys don’t like uppity women, do you? For shame!” Similarly, Jason Seiler’s Donald Trump cover last September, showing the candidate in profile, split the audience, with some readers writing in to vent their dismay at his ascent and others threatening to cancel their subscriptions if we continued our visual assaults.
The most requested print (behind the “Cowabunga” number) is quite possibly Fluharty’s Rembrandt parody, “Obama Contemplating a Bust of Jimmy Carter,” which illustrated Charles Krauthammer’s October 2009 essay, “Decline Is a Choice.”
Does politics rear its head in the world of illustration? How could it not? A couple of artists have refused to work for us on principle. Illustrators sometimes end up in the bull’s-eye, as Seiler discovered from a flurry of online criticism after putting Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner on a box of Wheaties. When it came time to represent the crushing political correctness of the LGBT blacklist-ers, the artist who finally agreed to render our symbolic steamroller insisted that a pseudonym be used as a credit, for fear of professional reprisal.
Of all Weekly Standard art, the most anticipated may be the cover work of our biannual “reading” issues. Since 2003, virtually all of these have been created by Mark Summers, featuring literary figures in seasonal poses, usually with some groan-inducing pun implied. Even now, this year’s “Summer Reading” cover is underway, and if history is any guide, a handful of readers will likely email to ask just what it is that Rudyard Kipling is doing and why it’s supposed to be funny.
Philip Chalk is the design director of The Weekly Standard.
