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
Category: Financial Press
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
Amazing. Like the reference to the president with Air Force One.
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.
Gitmo roooooolz!
Why doesn’t he just remove the “Fortune” header and sell this as a memento of what the US has become?
$4.99 a copy, are you kidding me?
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?”
That’s F***ing awesome!
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.
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.
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.
Oooh, the planes, the planes. Spooky.
@Venn
Ha! Awesome! =)
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.
FYI, I’ve uploaded the image here: http://www.kaleberg.com/images2010/fortune1.jpg
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.
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”.
God bless bloggers and PHUCK Fortune, CNBS and the rest of the Dennis Kneale delusionalists.
What does “DK’d” mean?
A work of art, a work of truth.
Bravo!
A graveyard? Come on, some of this is just negativity for negativity’s sake.
@quiddity: i’m not sure if this is it, but
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dk.asp
Speaking of Fortune 500 (& climate change), a good read:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175236/tomgram%3A_rebecca_solnit%2C_v_for_viability/#more
[...] 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 [...]
How about CA breaking away from NA and sinking into the Pacific!
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it’s time to dig out my old “Europe on $10 a Day”
@Quiddity:
Dennis Knealed
I like the Mexico Fabrica de Exploitacion
I know those too well… Perfect description.