A Pair of Covers in the Penny Press!

To celebrate the return at long last of Stevereads to its full technological capacity (such as it ever was), I thought I'd celebrate two recent New Yorker covers. One appeared at the of July, the other at the beginning of August, and both are serious contenders for the fat volume of Best New Yorker Covers Ever.



The first is by the always-reliable Adrian Tomine. It's called “Summer Getaway,” and even in the mangled form in which it reached me (for once, my dogs can't be blamed – it was just sinfully crowded in the old Post Office box that day), you can see the beautiful simplicity of it: that thoroughly urban little girl we all instantly love, looking longingly at the steel-and-glass skyline of Manhattan as her cluelessly happy parents drive her away from the city. No cartoonish pyrotechnics are needed here – the great little point couldn't be clearer, or more true.



The second is by Christoph Neimann, and it takes that simplicity even further. The piece is titled “Dropped Call,” showing us a shapely young beauty reclining poolside, looking down in alarm at her sinking cell phone. As with the Tomine cover, the genius here is the minimalism – that startled, upraised hand says more than most of the actual words in the issue.

The New Yorker can go months-long stretches without a memorable cover and sometimes a whole year without one as fantastic as these two, so I thought they deserved a moment's notice. We'll get back to the written word next time!