What's a newspaper to do with a story like the cancellation of this year's NHL season? It obviously has to go on your sports section's front page, but there are no pictures to go with it. You could run a photo of the loathsome commish making his cynical "apology" to the fans, but press conference photos are boring, and Bettman's mug isn't going to move papers.
Commissioning an editorial illustration is probably a good idea, because all three of New York's big daily papers thought of it. Here's what they ran:
New York Post
Since it got Murdocked, the Post's graphics have succeeded more on their outrageousness than on their artfulness. When you see U.N. diplomats on the front page with weasel heads Photoshopped over their own, it doesn't matter that the Photoshopping's not especially virtuosic. You're like: "oh, man! Weasel heads! That's craaaazy! What won't this paper do?" Poor judgment and lax standards being their strengths, they might have gone with an image of Bettman being strung up by his neck or something. But they didn't. So readers got this, which is kind of lame:
New York Daily News
What's in the Daily News? I'll tell you what's in the Daily News: a full (tabloid) page image of this weird melting puck. It's OK. Striking, even. I noticed it at the newsstand, and it's not my custom to notice this paper.
New York Times
The Gray Lady is this town's best paper, so why shouldn't her NHL season cancellation illustration be the best, too? Joe Zeff's gorgeous illo reproduces darker online than on newsprint (the other papers' graphics did too), but it looks great both ways. It has a painterly look, but most of the work samples on
Joe's web site are photo illustrations and 3-D renderings and the like, so maybe this is too.
By the way: I'd just like to reassure visitors that I didn't buy the Post. I found a discarded copy on the N.