Blown Covers is a new book that reveals rejected New Yorker covers. Françoise Mouly, the magazine's art editor since 1993, explains her process:
"Think of me as your priest," she told one of them. Mouly, who cofounded the avant- garde comics anthology RAW with her husband, Art Spiegelman, asks the artists she works with — Barry Blitt, Christoph Niemann, Ana Juan, R. Crumb — not to hold back anything in their cover sketches. If that means the occasional pedophilia gag or Holocaust joke finds its way to her desk, she's fine with that. Tasteless humor and failed setups are an essential part of the process. "Sometimes something is too provocative or too sexist or too racist," Mouly says, "but it will inspire a line of thinking that will help develop an image that is publishable."
On the above image:
Anita Kunz’s drawing of Monica Lewinsky with a lollipop—why was that rejected?
We had already run an image on the topic, and we did not anticipate at the time how salacious the discourse was to become. It took us by surprise; we didn’t expect that The New York Times would have the word blowjob on the front page day after day after day after day. Often the artists know—because they actually are paying attention to stuff that’s in the air, they are so often ahead of their time.
The Dish 