World War 3 Illustrated

A New Yorker Cover by Art Spiegelman. Here is the story of this cover as told by the artist:

“41 Shots 10c,” New Yorker cover for March 8, 1999.

My first cover for the New Yorker was in 1993 under then-new editor Tina Brown. It showed a Hassidic man and a woman of color kissing on Valentine’s Day in the aftermath of the Crown Heights race riots that had roiled the city. I It looked innocent but caused an international media buzz storm (as big a ruckus as you could make in the world before twitter) and inaugurated a willingness to run “controversial” covers mixed in with the more genteel ones that had been the magazine’s tradition.

My first cover for David Remnick after he inherited editorship of the magazine happened shortly after Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, had just been killed outside his Bronx apartment by four policemen who shot at him 41 times when he reached for his key. The officers involved were all still on the street as protests grew—New York’s minority communities were feeling increasingly  terrorized by the overwhelmingly Caucasian police Street Crime Unit under Mayor Giuliani. David approved a fax of my scrawl and went back to sleep while I stumbled back to my studio to get the drawing done in time to go on press the next day.
When the cover appeared all Hell broke loose. An editorial in the New York Post called me a “creep,” sputtering that if I ever needed emergency help I should turn to Reverend Al Sharpton rather than to the police. A hundred and fifty armed off-duty policemen gathered at the magazine’s gates to protest being portrayed as bullies. I defended my drawing, explaining that it was “a picture of a picture,” showing the image of the friendly and helpful neighborhood beat cop, as popularized in old movies and comics, now distorted by all-too-real police beatings and violence.
I hoped the outrage against the cover could be redirected back toward a dialogue on the subject that had inspired it… and hoped that nobody would try to shoot the messenger. My kids were at my studio watching the TV news with me the day the cover first hit the stands. We saw the police commissioner publicly condemn me, followed by the governor who said he was “disappointed” in the magazine and a furious Mayor Giuliani, who indignantly said he was “disgusted.” My then seven year old son, Dash, asked if we could switch over to the Cartoon Network, but my ten year old daughter, Nadja turned to me with shining eyes and said: “Oh, papa. I’m so proud!” I knew why I had become a cartoonist.
By drawing the amusement park targets as black silhouettes I’d somehow deracinated them so they became a symbol of all residents as potential targets. Bootleg badges of the cover were on sale at the now more diverse demonstrations that began to grow outside police head-quarters in Manhattan, and a parade of celebrities let themselves get arrested at the daily protests. The New Yorker’s tall soap-box had helped a tragic local story get wide international coverage. (Sadly, the laws of Unintended Consequences eventually undermined my cover’s intent: an appellate court cited the cover as proof that the officers involved couldn’t get a fair hearing in the city, and the case was moved to a  far more conservative court in Albany where the four policemen were acquitted.)