"Four Centuries and a Cloud of Dust," 2/6/05

For Superbowl Sunday the illo gets, not cartoonish exactly, more bigfooted. A Fightin' Pilgrim and a Battlin' Quaker face off in frieze-like symmetry, fisted clenched and knuckles dragging. Illustrator Douglas Fraser renders the figures like primitivist stone trolls, all zigzag shapes and rough shadows. It's an oblique way of pointing out that, for all the erudition of Ben Franklin scholar Stacy Schiff's portrait of 18th-century Boston and Philly, football is the reason for the season.