Like many of you, when I first saw Kevin Hanley’s image of Mayor Riley starring down from atop the Francis Marion Hotel I nodded my head and thought to myself, “Nice, dude. Fucking nice.”
Our art director Scott Suchy did too, and when he said he had an idea based around that, I said, “Go for it.” I wanted to see what he could do with the image. As our cover designer, Suchy knows what works best on the cover and what doesn’t. And I’m not talking about purely aesthetic things; we often disagree on that. I’m referring to the mechanics of the cover — we’re the headline’s going to be, how big it should be, how big should the image be and what colors, what do we do with our logo, what font to choose, where to place the teasers, etc, namely the stuff he and his production team have been trained to do.
That said, I wanted to reach out to Kevin. After all, he inspired us, and he’s a talented motherfucker.
And so, I asked contacted him last Wednesday if we could use his images, the primary one being his “Andre the Giant has a posse” parody, “The Mayor has a bedtime.” In our email exchange, I explained to him that Suchy was an ace designer and had come up with something for the cover, and even though, our turn around time was tight (we want to have your covers done by Friday, earlier if possible), I’d like him to create a unique design too, if he wanted. And even if we didn’t, I like to pay him for any images we used — I really wanted the “Andre the Giant has a posse” parody — and in the case he wasn’t interested, we’d give him credit, not because we needed to or anything but because I like to give credit where credit is due (I can’t tell you how many times we’ve broken a story and one of our fellow media companies fails to give us credit for doing so).
As for Hanley’s image of Joe Riley staring down from the Francis Marion, I told him the text stood out way too much. Equally as troubling, the “Go to Bed” text below the image of Joe was placed over the building itself; it wasn’t inserted into the image, like it is in Shepard Fairey’s traditional Obey Giant image.
Shortly after that email, Hanley wrote me back with a slightly altered version of the Francis Marion image. This time the text was inserted into the image but it was lazily placed over Riley’s mouth. Hanley also said, “Do what you like. Here’s some adjusted ones.”
Help keep the City Paper free.
No paywalls.
No subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations.
Help support independent journalism by donating today.