How 'The New Yorker' Cover Became Twitter Gold

The first really talked-about New Yorker cover came nearly 70 years after the magazine’s founding. In 1992, when Tina Brown took over as the fourth editor in its history, she broke a long-standing editorial taboo by adding three brand-name visual artists to the staff: cartoonist Art Spiegelman, illustrator Edward Sorel and photographer Richard Avedon. The Feb. 15, 1993 edition — coming one day after Valentine’s Day and not two years after the Crown Heights riot — was fronted by Spiegelman’s drawing of a Hasidic man, in hat, coat and beard, making out with a black woman.

There was, generally speaking, an uproar. But not from all quarters, according to Spiegelman. “Many voices came forward to express delight with the cover as well,” he said in Blown Covers, a book about New Yorker covers edited by the magazine’s art editor, Françoise Mouly (who is also Spiegelman’s wife). “My favorite was from a young reader who wrote that she didn’t understand the controversy. She thought that it was sweet of the magazine, on the week of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, to show him kissing a slave.” Read more...