MrBiggs dot comBrian Biggs illustration

Referring to the maze posted in the last entry, and published in McSweeney's The Goods. Click the image to make it bigger.

If you shop, you know it's President's Day weekend coming up. If you read the paper, and we all know that no one reads the paper any more, you'll also know it's President's Day. How? You might or may have seen this funny-shaped work of art:

This is in The Goods, which is a collection of fun and games and puzzles and tricks that will make you entertained and possibly forget about the bad news that newspapers are famous for. The Goods is courtesy of McSweeney's and Tribune Media and includes many other artists of repute such as Adam Rex and Carson Ellis and Lane Smith and Jon Klassen and Sean Qualls and Jon Scieszka and Bob Shea.

Since you can't turn this blog post around to see this better, as you can in a paper, I'll upright it here for you.

Saturday I'll post the solution to the maze. In case it's too hard for you.

A blast from election day past!

In 2000, I was asked by the Philadelphia Weekly to do the cover for the post-election day issue, which was to hit the stands the day after the Bush/Gore election. As you might recall, the election was extremely close going into the final days. The editors, art director and I decided that the best route was to do two covers. The expectation was that by the time the paper had to hit the presses it would be clear who had won.
Ha ha ha. Little did anyone know that it would actually be two months before anyone knew who "won." After all that, the paper ended up running a picture of Ralph Nader on the cover (see below).
The best part was the getting to put in the little jokes at the bottom of these covers. Be sure to click on the images to see them larger.
And if you haven't got out to vote yet, get off your computer and go do so!

Here's the cover that actually ran the next day. As disappointed as I was as the illustrator of the other two, I thought it was pretty clever. Thanks to the former PW a.d. Jeff Cox for sending this cover along.

A year or so ago, the amazing Keri Smith dropped me an email asking if I'd take part in a project that her husband, Jefferson Pitcher and two of his friends, Christian Kiefer and Matthew Gerken, were working on. It's a collection of 43 songs, each about a different president. So, you know, there's a song about Eisenhower. And one about Lincoln. And Reagan. Etc. I asked if I could have the one with the sideburns. And so I was asked to illustrate Chester Arthur, our 21st president.
So then yesterday, Oct 8, I hear a story about the project on National Public Radio and I find that they included my Arthur in the nice slideshow. You can read more about the project here, with links to buy the thing. Enjoy.

I got an email from Keri Smith recently asking me to be part of a project that involves presidents of the U.S. I requested good facial hair and as a result got Chester Arthur, 21st President of the United States (1829 – 1886).
I didn't know much about this fellow, but I did some reading and lots of sketching. The final isn't done yet, but here are two sketches. Stay tuned for more on this project.