This shouldn't count as a book cover judgment, but I'm the Judge, and judges misuse their courts all the time, right? First this country's judges lost the wigs, then the entire US Judicial branch snapped like a twig under the weight of the plump bluebird of corruption. Yes, Book Cover Judge will mix nonsensical metaphors! Order in the court!
So today I feature my latest love story.
The Believer
Published by McSweeney's, March-April 2008
Cover art by Charles Burns
So yes, this is a magazine, not a book. However, it's a $10 magazine, which is more than I can spend on a book anyway. If being the Judge did pay more, the first thing I'd spring for is any one of Burns's horrifyingly delicious-looking graphic novels:
Mmm.
Another reason this post is breaking my judgment rules is that I've read the contents before writing my review. I think I made that decision early on so that the text couldn't taint my perception of the cover art. The joy of Borders has nothing to do with text for me. It's all about the silky surfaces; the enticing colors; the smell of newness, paper, and glue; and the cornacopia of fonts to visually delight me. But, to be fair, I have never read an entire copy of The Believer before. (It's really dense, ok?) And again, power of the Judge, blah blah blah.
Charles Burns always does the art for this magazine. Consistency is important in a magazine; however, most popular publications rely too heavily on their routines:
I think these three poses are recycled month after month. Color of the magazine and content, too. (This is all I can say right now. To comment on even one of the call-outs would take way too much of my limited blogging space.)
Back to Burns. Let me re-paste an image to cleanse our eyeball palattes:
January issue, 2008
Better. Although this is frequently the set-up for the design of this cover (9 squares of alternating headlines and images), Burns is willing to mix it up, particularly if the magazine has a specific theme. The March-April magazine is their film issue, and it seems quite clever to scatter the main players of the mag around a hypnotic vortex of literary/cinematic doom, since this issue (of course) makes frequent mention of both Hitchcock and his Vertigo.
Even without a different or dynamic composition, Burns' portraiture always amazes me. As a graphic artist, he has mysteriously found the line between play and pretention. Familiar faces in this graphic style are eye-catching, as the marketers who employ rotoscoping* for Charles Shwab know well, but this goes beyond the hook, as the pros say. Burns bridges the playfulness of comic strips (well reflecting the winking nature of anything McSweeney's does) with the dramatic, exaggerated chiaroscuro** I associate with block printing and olden-tymey newspapers. White and dark sit right next to each other, comfortably, stubbornly refusing to allow grayscale onto the page. And while The Believer is arguably all about the gray areas, I'd like to think that both the content of the magazine and the cover illustrations are just as much about clarity and truth then the lack thereof. To ignore the desire for the black-and-white answers would make the authors' explorations pointless (though these explorations ironically are the ones muddying the waters), and it would deny our humanity, our fundamental hope for crystal-clear understanding of our world. Burns makes me believe the mag's writers are not pompous academics who use big words to make me feel like I shouldn't have gone to a state school. Nay. They are seekers of truth. And I'm a believer, too.
*Rotoscoping, a term that has something to do with cartoony-looking but real-life people, was used in the indie film Chicago Ten, and helps convince people that I am well-informed.
**Chiaroscuro, along with meaning light and dark in a picture, also helps to make me sound like I went to college, even in a sentence that employs the phrase "olden tymey."
