Who's on trial here?

This illustration of mine ran in The New Yorker this past week. It's for a Jill Lepore article on the Victim's Rights Movement- a marriage of feminism and conservatism- and how it has affected the justice system in the U.S.

The movement was started in the 1960s by conservatives trying to combat the "soft on crime" notions of civil liberties, like needing a warrant to obtain evidence to be presented against a defendant, and reading Miranda rights. It attempts to give victims of crimes (usually murder, but also rape) and their loved ones a voice in court- a noble cause to be sure- with a "victim-impact statement": often presenting the life story of the victim, showing pictures or videos during trial, as a way of proving the value of the person whose life has been cut short (in the case of murder). But it has ended up leading to "tough on crime" bills with mandatory minimums, and exacerbates the same kind of racial bias present in so many criminal trials, but toward the victim instead, with jurors less likely to be compelled by victim-impact statements from black victims than from white victims. There's also the issue of examining the worth of the victims. If the victim isn't considered as "valuable" by the community, is the crime less serious? Here's the full page:

It's a very intriguing, in-depth look at how a movement with some good intentions contributed to our system of mass incarceration. Check out the story. Thank you to Chris and Nicholas!

Do you solemnly swear?

I did this illustration for the front page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Opinion section last Sunday. It's for a great essay on human organizations and loyalty.

The essay singled out our two political parties here in the U.S., and why it's so problematic to pledge our loyalty to them. It made sense to show the red and blue color separations coming apart as the image of the hand taking an oath warps and melts, breaking down. Thank you to Kim, AD on this!

Aztecs, Amphibians and Transferred Consciousness

So if you've been checking out this blog for a while, or even if you just scroll through my posts over the last few years, you'll know that I like to work on personal projects centered around short stories and books I enjoy. There was this, and this, and oh yeah this. But it had been some time since I'd done any personal projects like that. Close to a couple years. With assignments, the move out to the East Coast, among other things, it just wasn't in the cards. So I wanted to take some time recently to work on another series, and chose some Julio Cortázar stories from the collection Blow-Up. My descriptions of the stories below definitely contain spoilers. So if you haven't read the stories and want to, just look at the pretty pictures, ignore the words, and then go out and read them.

This story is probably my favorite in the collection. It centers around a young, French bachelor named Pierre and his relationship with a young woman named Michéle. As the story unfolds, we see that something is going on with Pierre: he starts experiencing brief personality changes, and having strange memories: details of a house he's never been in, dry leaves, and songs like Im wunderschönen Monat Mai. Michéle sees some of these odd changes, and it reminds her of someone and also terrifies her. The memories become more frequent and disorienting, and the changes become more menacing. Michéle contacts a couple of friends to ask for help, as she's alone with Pierre at her parents' summer home. It's clear that Pierre is not himself, at least sometimes. The story ends with Pierre ascending the stairs to Michéle's room and entering, thinking she looks older for some reason, and Michéle screaming while her grabs her hair, feeling "all the pleasure that rises and drenches him..." Meanwhile, Michéle's friends are on their way to the house, and recall the Nazi soldier who attacked and raped Michéle during the occupation when she was a child, and was subsequently caught and executed by her friends: "I remember how he fell, his face blasted to bits among the dry leaves."
I wanted to depict Pierre's consciousness warping into the Nazi, and I liked the leaves floating through the composition as a reference to the connection between his random memories and elements that are significant to the Nazi's death. Using the two different typefaces also alludes to the personality switch, and the color palette hints at the Nazi soldier.

"The Night Face Up" is about a man who gets in a motorcycle accident and is taken to the hospital. Lying in bed, he starts to dream about running for his life from Aztecs pursuing him through the jungle, but wakes to find himself safe in bed again. However, his drowsiness is overpowering and he continues to doze off, each time finding himself in the same dream, continuing, with his pursuers getting closer and closer with each dream, until finally he's captured and hauled off to the temple. In his last dream he's carried to the sacrificial altar, and smells the smoke, and sees the blood dripping down it. As he shuts his eyes and tries to wake up again, he realizes that he can't. The altar is real. The hospital bed was the dream. And a man with a knife approaches him while he lies face up, between the bonfires on the temple steps.
I wanted to show the tranquil hospital scene being torn away with surreal pieces of an alternate reality revealed behind it. The title continuing through both scenes represents the man experiencing both universes. The typography is also treated with a very hazy, dreamlike movement through the composition. The grayscale of the hospital and color of the temple elements also reinforces the idea of the hospital being the actual dream, with the popular conception (whether correct or not) of dreams being in black and white.

This is the first story in the collection, and it's a great introduction to Cortázar's brilliant, metaphysical storytelling. A man visiting the zoo happens upon an axolotl exhibit. He finds the little salamanders so fascinating that he returns again and again to watch them, seemingly obsessed with "their little pink Aztec faces... The anthropomorphic features of a monkey reveal the reverse of what most people believe, the distance that is traveled from them to us." He begins visiting them every day, and starts to feel that he's "projecting a nonexistent consciousness" on them: "I imagined them aware, slaves of their bodies, condemned infinitely to the silence of the abyss, to a hopeless meditation." He marvels at one, his face pressed up against the glass, peering into the unblinking eyes, staring for so long that he suddenly sees his own face. He's looking into his own face, on the other side of the glass, and realizes he's an axolotl, in the aquarium. His consciousness, his human mind has been transferred to the body of an axolotl. He sees the man return to look at his exhibit, but the visits soon taper off. He thinks that for a while he had a chance at re-entering his human body, when the man was interested in the axolotls, but for now all he can hope for is that the man writes a story about them, thinking he made it all up.
I had the idea of reflecting and morphing the man's face into a weird, symmetrical image, but the end result was just as much the product of experimenting with manipulating the faces. I wanted it to refer to when the man looks into the aquarium glass at the axolotl, and then sees himself as his consciousness transfers to it. The moment of the transposition of his essence, and one of the images ended up resembling a little axolotl face. It came about accidentally, but worked out perfectly.

Mmmmmm, beer!

This little spot was in last Sunday's New York Times' book review of Robert Coover's new short story collection, Going for a Beer.

 The review describes a few of the stories in the collection, including "Invasion of the Martians," and many others suffused with magic and mythology. The title story concerns a man whose life seems little more than a drunken haze, bouncing from one experience to the next, with the next experience happening before the current is even finished. And, of course, a fair share of them transpire at a bar. I wanted to combine the temptation of going down the bar for a cold one with some of the elements from other stories, and a beer bottle cap as a flying saucer ended up a nice way to do it. Go pick up the collection! Thank you to Matt, AD for this one!