Well, he’s an editor. 
But I’m not seeing how he could be power mad for doing something he’s specifically supposed to do, which is picking the cover art.
I thought Crumb was against gay marriage, but I may be wrong there. This blog post quotes Crumb explaining the illustration:
So maybe the cover isn’t anti-gay, it’s just sort of stupid and stereotypical, plus confusing and unclear. That’s more than enough reason to turn it down in any case.
A) Re: “Well, he’s an editor,” said the administrator to the (you didn’t know) professional editor.
B) Pretty sure Crumb was quoted as saying Remnick is power mad–one assumes he means across the board. That’s why I used the phrase.
C) IMO Crumb’s cover, whether drawn by someone who is against gay marriage or not, is itself, seen absent any mental Crumb baggage, neutral on that score.
Oh, I think it works just fine. He didn’t have a strip to work with, so putting the “gender inspection” in the same panel gets it across. ISTM, he’s pointing out that if a couple SAYS they are a man and a woman (as the caricatured couple probably would) what’s the governments next step? Verification?
The Olympic Games have a “Gender Verification” department, so it is not that far-fetched.
You can subject employees and competing athletes to all sorts of things that you wouldn’t get away with doing to Americans going about their lives. You seriously think every State setting up a gender verification system before marriage license issue wouldn’t be a bit of a tough sell?
It isn’t in any way anti-gay, nor is the message at all confusing (Chronos gave a perfect summing-up). The New Yorker, whose readership after all is of above-average intelligence and unlikely to have misread this as a gay slur, should have run it. At the very least they owed Crumb an explanation for their dithering.
Love Crumb. Love the New Yorker. The artwork was far from prime Crumb, and not really New Yorker quality level.
None of the three people is a classic keenly observed Crumb character. (Although I like the “guy” on the left.) The punchline sign on the right is not well-integrated into the design, and I can’t offhand think of a way to handle it better. My immediate interpretation of the cartoon matched Crumb’s explanation, “Do we really want marriage licenses to require DNA tests?”.
Crumb’s reaction to the rejection (I’ll never have anything to do with the New Yorker again) is stupid and cranky. If the editor had reservations similar to my own (poor rendering, poor layout), I can imagine Crumb throwing a hissy-fit about having to redraw it multiple times.
Should the New Yorker have offered an explanation to RC? I don’t really know. It depends on their history with Bob and their general traditions in dealing with artists.
That was exactly my interpretation, although I admit it took me a few seconds to work out the point he was making. Not immediately obvious, but clever.
Lol
That’s Our Crumb!
I assume it’s the “Gender Inspection” sign that’s the point of the illustration, though I have a hard time understanding what the point is. The thing is, the fight for same-sex marriage is the fight for marriage in which ***gender is irrelevant. ***The “Gender Inspection” implies that there is, say, a different form or a different license, depending on the genders of the people involved. The implication is that some marriages, by virtue of the genders involved, are different kinds of marriages. Only a person opposed to marriage equality would have this point of view.
Bingo. It amazes, confuses and depresses me that so many missed the point, let alone to think the illustration is anti-gay/gay marriage. Took me about 1.1 second to get the point and I laughed. It’s an absolutely perfect comment on how stupid anti-gay marriage laws are. I don’t think it’s confusing and unclear at all, and I’m not a Crumbhead like my husband, who owns practically everything Crumb’s ever done. I’ve barely gone past seeing the movie Crumb, yet I got it right away. I thought it was immediately obvious.
From the OP’s link:
These people must think millions of gays and lesbians are absolute morons. How insulting to think that most gays and lesbians wouldn’t have immediately got the point and laughed their ass off.
[QUOTE=Marley23]
I thought Crumb was against gay marriage, but I may be wrong there.
[/QUOTE]
You MAY be wrong? And then you go on to quote Crumb himself:
[QUOTE=R Crumb]
The verdict isn’t in, that’s the whole point. Banning gay marriage is ridiculous because how are you supposed to tell what f***ing gender anybody is if they’re bending it around? It could be anything-a she-male marrying a transsexual, or what the hell. People are capable of any sexual thing. To ban their marriage because someone doesn’t like the idea of both of them being the same sex, that’s ridiculous. That was the whole point of the cover: here is this official from the marriage license bureau, and he can’t tell if he’s seeing a man and a woman or two women. What the hell are they? You can’t tell what they are! I had the idea of making them both look unisex, no gender at all. On TV once I saw this person who is crusading against sexual definition, and you could not tell if this person was male or female-completely asexual. I was originally going to do the cover that way, but when I drew that it just looked uninteresting so I decided it should be more lurid somehow.
[/QUOTE]
See post 21.
I have a low opinion of the guy and I find his cartoon so confused and off-topic that it’s hard for me to take his comment at face value.
I’m really not seeing a convincing argument that the cover is in any way anti-gay, or even particularly ambiguous in its message. It’s so clearly illustrating the inherent lunacy of gender-based marriage laws, my honest first reaction after seeing the cover was that the controversy was over the New Yorker being homophobic for rejecting it. The idea that there’s a controversy over whether the cover is homophobic is baffling to me.
I think it’s also interesting that the conversation has gotten this far without anyone noting that the couple getting married isn’t gay. No matter how you define gender, that’s a picture of an opposite sex couple getting hitched. And that’s the real punchline to the piece. The “gender inspection” sign is part of the set up (and, I think, a bit too obvious. The picture would work just as well without it.) The joke is that these characters have passed (or will pass) the gender inspection with flying colors. And yet, taken individually, each character represents an extreme example of the sort of person anti-marriage advocates generally most strongly despise. The character in the miniskirt looks like an anti-gay stereotype, because that’s the point of the joke: anti-marriage laws were created to discriminate against precisely these sorts of people, and here they’re utterly failing in their intended purpose. Which I think is a really amazingly positive viewpoint about gay society and the gay rights movement: we’re discriminated against because we have unconventional ideas about love and gender, and here’s a couple who are able to subvert and defeat discrimination precisely because of their unconventional ideas about love and gender.
That said, the picture is not without its flaws. As I said earlier, the “Gender Inspection” sign is too on-the-nose, and is an unrealistic touch in what is other wise a very realistic situation. (The sign is unrealistic because nobody has to disrobe to prove their gender, even in the states with the most repressive marriage laws - they just go with what is printed on your birth certificate. The overall situation, however, is realistic, in that trans people often end up dating other trans people.)
I think having the female-presenting character in a miniskirt was also a mistake. The male-presenting character is wearing a fairly formal suit. I think the picture would have worked better with the other character in a wedding dress. But, God love him, Crumb wouldn’t be Crumb is he wasn’t a giant perv, so I’m not surprised he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to draw an over-sized female in a tight skirt.
Still, it’s an awesome image. I wouldn’t mind owning a print of it.
And the boy in the suit is fucking hot.
I liked it – to me the humor and central point of the whole thing was the look of growing terror on the face of the poor low-level clerk who was realizing he is going to have to call out this couple and, worse, may have to perform the gender inspection himself…
Maybe I’m too attuned to the plight of low-level government employees, I don’t know, but that’s what I saw. (And the political point to me was the ridiculousness of gender restrictions on marriages, especially since the one on the left *could *be male, and maybe the one on the right is a well muscled (OK, and hairy-handed) woman…)
Of course Crumb is a crazy prima donna for being upset that the editor made, you know, an editorial decision. But hey, good for Crumb that he can afford to turn down work, right?
+1
The issue with the cover is the obvious. Yes, I think it’s a pro-gay marriage drawing, but it communicates it by taking the perspective of the anti-gay marraige view to the extreme. A cover should be thought provoking, but it also needs to very clearly communicate the topic and not rely on being familiar with the work of the artist or being closely connected to the subject matter to suss out the message. To me, at a casual glance, it looks like its mocking gays, and it’s only after thinking about it a bit that I realize it’s the exact opposite.
And I don’t think The New Yorker owes him any sort of explanation. It clearly not work as a cover, because covers need to be unambiguous in the message they portray to sell the magazine, and have the more thought provoking stuff inside with context where the intended audience can get the real message. Moreso, I’m not familiar with the artist, but based on what I’ve read in this thread, I can hazard a guess that they problem thought his art would be really cool and relevant to the topic, but after seeing it, they realized it just wouldn’t work. It’s not a “well, change this or change that” but that his entire style just wouldn’t cut it. Besides, just like any other sort of rejection, like applying for a job or getting turned down for a date, you’re not OWED an explanation. It’s a courtesy, but it’s not mandated. Hell, especially in a case like this, maybe the editor couldn’t really articulate it, or realized there wasn’t really anything he could ask Crumb to do to fix it, since the problem is his style.
Either way, Crumb should suck it up. Not everyone is going to like your art, and that goes double for when the subject matter is something that is going to be touchy and controversial.
How would it have gone?
*"Dear Bob:
I’m sorry but I’m afraid there’s a large segment of offenderati among our readership, who’d think it’s about mocking the transgender community. As we already used up our reserve of goodwill on the Obamas’ fist-bump cover, we believe we’d get pasted on this one. So we have to decline this time around and let you choose where else to publish it.
Keep on truckin’,
David"*
Crumb may still have thrown a fit and said he’ll never work with them again, sure, but that’s his business .
