Fortune 500 Cover DK’d
By Barry Ritholtz - April 23rd, 2010, 4:00PM
Chris Ware is a graphic artist with a specific style and a very specific point of view. He was asked to create a cover for the May issue of Fortune, specifically about the Fortune 500.
Apparently, what he turned in did meet the editors approval. Indiepulp observed:
“He accepted the job because it would be like doing the 1929 issue of the magazine, and he filled the image with tons of satirical imagery, like the U.S. Treasury being raided by Wall Street, China dumping money into the ocean, homes being flooded, homes being foreclosed, and CEOs dancing a jig while society devolves into chaos.”
Surprise! Fortune rejected the cover. (What a bunch of wimps!)
click for truly ginormous graphic
Hat tip kottke
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April 23rd, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Amazing. Like the reference to the president with Air Force One.
April 23rd, 2010 at 4:16 pm
What a shame; It’s gorgeous! He did a great job, including most everything. The only thing he might have added is a California McMansion.
April 23rd, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Gitmo roooooolz!
April 23rd, 2010 at 5:02 pm
Why doesn’t he just remove the “Fortune” header and sell this as a memento of what the US has become?
April 23rd, 2010 at 5:23 pm
$4.99 a copy, are you kidding me?
April 23rd, 2010 at 5:54 pm
LOL, “Greenspan LubePro” …
I hear they found a buyer for that property – coming soon: A new JiffyBoob breast-enlargement franchise. “Would you like to supersize those, ma’am?”
April 23rd, 2010 at 6:33 pm
That’s F***ing awesome!
April 23rd, 2010 at 6:40 pm
Great depiction…although I do think he should have built it higher and with a steeple on top, because we all know who god truly is.
April 23rd, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Did Fortune say why they rejected it? Cool concept, but as far as graphic design goes, it’s not very good. It looks like the artist just took a bunch of stock cartoon art into Illustrator and InDesign and threw something together.
April 23rd, 2010 at 7:00 pm
Chris Ware, that sounds like a foreign name. … he tries peddling that anti-USA garbage here in Arizona and we’ll confiscate it and toss him (AND that de factoid immigrant Obama) on the next garbage scow back to Kenya.
April 23rd, 2010 at 8:37 pm
Oooh, the planes, the planes. Spooky.
April 23rd, 2010 at 9:01 pm
@Venn
Ha! Awesome! =)
April 23rd, 2010 at 9:06 pm
It’s a pretty good cover actually. It reminds me of some of the old thematic cartographics they used to run with their articles on various nations and regions. Fortune used to have great covers back in the 1930s. They started February 1930, so they just missed the big crash in ’29. Their first cover featured the goddess Fortuna, topless. Maybe she had lost her shirt in the market crash? I doubt they’ll be running anything like that these sad days.
April 23rd, 2010 at 9:09 pm
FYI, I’ve uploaded the image here: http://www.kaleberg.com/images2010/fortune1.jpg
April 23rd, 2010 at 10:06 pm
Beautiful Lego two-dimensional universe of what’s happening now, baby.
Is that Gitmo, or Cuba?
Living in Texas, I loved our survivalists. We also have our own separate electric grid. Take that, you other 49 state losers!!!!
Is Buffet fiddling while Rome burns?
He is also very timely on the just passed new Arizona illegal alien law…looks like a few fellas are already doing a little shootin down thar.
April 23rd, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Hey Barry, if you have any friends in the music business, see if they could write a song for this cover. Set it to the tune “We Built This City on Rock and Roll”.
April 23rd, 2010 at 11:33 pm
God bless bloggers and PHUCK Fortune, CNBS and the rest of the Dennis Kneale delusionalists.
April 23rd, 2010 at 11:46 pm
What does “DK’d” mean?
April 24th, 2010 at 1:08 am
A work of art, a work of truth.
Bravo!
April 24th, 2010 at 1:24 am
A graveyard? Come on, some of this is just negativity for negativity’s sake.
April 24th, 2010 at 6:40 am
@quiddity: i’m not sure if this is it, but
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dk.asp
April 24th, 2010 at 7:05 am
Speaking of Fortune 500 (& climate change), a good read:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175236/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_v_for_viability/#more
April 24th, 2010 at 8:05 am
[...] Run This Chris Ware Cover?, Fortoon, Chris Ware’s finished rejected cover for Fortune magazine, Fortune 500 Cover DK’d, and Paul Krugman: Don’t Cry for Wall [...]
April 24th, 2010 at 9:47 am
How about CA breaking away from NA and sinking into the Pacific!
April 24th, 2010 at 9:50 am
BR: OT
How about a post about Greece and The Big Picture impact of its bailout? the WSJ reported this morning that it will get about $60 billion in aid. How’s Greece anything but another little rumbling aftershock of the massive tectonic forces of demography and debt affecting developed-world economies? How does this play out for The Big Picture?
Regarding the cover–nice, except it should have included more than the US.
April 24th, 2010 at 9:50 am
7 Illinois banks closed yesterday, maybe it should show Illinois slipping into the great lakes. I thought Chigo area had avoided the worst of the ummm “economic slowdown”
U.S. regulators closed seven Illinois banks on Friday, the largest of which was Amcore Bank and including a Chicago bank closely tied to the Democratic candidate running for President Obama’s former Senate seat.
The failures bring to 57 the number of U.S. banks that have failed this year, after 140 failures in 2009. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said the total cost to its deposit insurance fund from Friday’s failures topped $970 million.
State banking regulators closed Chicago’s Broadway Bank, owned by the family of Alexi Giannoulias, who is locked in a midterm-election battle with U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) for President Obama’s old Senate seat. Mr. Giannoulias’s role at the scandal-plagued institution, which had total assets of about $1.2 billion as of the end of 2009, has become a central issue in the race.
April 24th, 2010 at 9:59 am
Curmudgeon, Maybe Eurozone will rate their own cover in a couple months or weeks.
Maybe a picture of “the new Europe” with the PIIGS missing like Atlantis.
April 24th, 2010 at 10:00 am
Maybe it’s time to dig out my old “Europe on $10 a Day”
April 24th, 2010 at 11:29 am
@Quiddity:
Dennis Knealed
April 26th, 2010 at 12:03 am
I like the Mexico Fabrica de Exploitacion
I know those too well… Perfect description.