Illo Watch

"Jose Canseco, Hero," 3/18/05

When literary heavy hitters like Michael Chabon swing for the column-inch bleachers, the illo must, uh,  do a... sacrifice... bunt? Oh, forget it, I can't do baseball metaphors, even mixed ones. In any case, John Hendrix's pic of baseball's new positions, small though it may be, is a dead-on parody of the MLB house style.

"Empty House on the Prairie," 3/2/05

John Hendrix has got to be one of the hardest-working men in illustration. Not only is he in the Times and the New Yorker a lot, he does tons of prominently featured color work in big national magazines like Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Harvard Business Review... if it skews male and upscale, Hendrix has illo'd for it. Not that I'm complaining: his work is always fun, mainstream pop culture is clearly his muse and today's featured op-ed subject, the American heartland, is a frequent theme of his. Hendrix's picture of a highway billboard flaunts his flair for lettering and earns charm points with New York readers like me with the line "Hey, city slicker!" For a companion to an op-ed about small-town desperation, this illo is definitely on the sunny side, but then so is Bob Greene's article. Update: Whaddya know, I just found out that John Hendrix is the current art director of the op-ed page.