They might be good. They might be bad. But (hopefully) they caught your attention.
Along the walls of the glamorous offices of the Charleston City Paper, you’ll find an array of large posters with a collage of images, one for every year since 2007. Each poster displays the photos and graphic illustrations on the cover of the issues we’ve published, week after week. We offer these to entice readers and often feel like parents proud of their newborns.
As art director, my job is to see each of these covers through, most times as its progenitor, sometimes more like a midwife dealing with the result of someone else’s series of bad decisions following a late night at the Recovery Room. And just like any long-time parent (or pet owner) would know, some children turn out to be great successes. Others can be a painful reminder that chugging a bottle of Grand Ma’ during the comedy festival can lead to many regrets you’ll have to just live with.
So here are 25 City Paper covers of note from the past 25 years. Enjoy this visual trip down memory lane.
Scott Suchy has been the City Paper’s art director since 2007.
LOVED IT: Degrees of Success (1997) A great illustration by Ashley Holt. I still chuckle thinking of Albert Einstein with his flair on. 
LOVED IT: Best of Charleston (2002) Still one of our finest Best Of covers brought to you by the talented Kevin Altieri. 
HATED IT: Best of the Blotter (2002) This was pre-having-a-Steve-Stegelin-on-staff. I’ll never take him for granted again. 
HATED IT: State of Design (2004) This one was before my time, so I can’t say I know the reasoning for the design decisions here, but I just can’t get over the lovely Charleston Big City skyline used in the collage about the rise of local graphic design. 
LOVED IT: Nate & Di are Smokin’ (2006) A great homage to Cheech and Chong. Google it, youngins. 
HATED IT: Redneck Summer (2007) Encouraging folks to embrace their inner Confederate flag-toting redneck selves just never struck me as something that was necessary, especially nowadays. 
LOVED IT: Zombie Economy (2009) Just a fun illustration to create about the housing market during tough times. Who doesn’t like zombies? 
LOVED IT: Nyan Cat (2011) Nyan Cat was big online, so why not create a “real” one for the cover of the College Student Guide? I wound up winning a Press Association award for it even though, according to their comments, the obviously older judges had no idea what it was exactly. 
HATED IT: Ectotour (2011) Would a little old-fashioned double exposure trick be fun for a story on hauntings? Sure! Would a poorly executed ghost costume be a little uncomfortable in the Deep South? Absolutely! (Fortunately, I don’t recall anyone misreading the image or intent.) 
LOVED IT: Joe Riley Time To Go (2011) Can anyone say that a little cartoon Joe Riley Jr. isn’t cute as the dickens? I specifically wanted Stegelin’s illustration to break the fourth wall and have the former Charleston mayor peeking out of the image frame. 
LOVED IT: Bedtime Riley (2014) One of my all-time favorites for its strong graphic qualities, this cover managed to start a small social media war over who borrowed Shepard Fairey’s idea first. 
LOVED IT: Allison Piepmeier (2014) Staff photographer Jonathan Boncek took a very striking portrait of the late College of Charleston professor and City Paper contributor in a very frank and honest way addressing her battle with a brain tumor. 
LOVED IT: Twisted Pretzels (2014) This was a practical effects kind of image executed with the help of the folks at Bay Street Biergarten. 
LOVED IT: Man-Baby (2015) Definitely creepy, but in a fun, underrated meme kind of way. 
LOVED IT: Charm School Dustin (2015) Cute, but in a severely disturbing kind of way. 
LOVED IT: Monkey Island (2016) This one wasn’t on the list for our 20th anniversary, but the more I look at it, the more it has become one of my favorite illustrated covers. Dalton Pencarinha’s artwork is always fun to look at. 
LOVED IT: Apoc-eclipse Now (2017) What do you get when you have a full solar eclipse possibly signaling the end times and back-to-school? One hell of a fun cover to put together. 
LOVED IT: Michael Myers (2017) Parody is some of my favorite means to create fun covers. This one spoofed the “real” tabloids when they were shooting the Halloween movies around town. 
LOVED IT: Ultra Spiritual (2018) My favorite covers are always when we can tap into popular culture. Here we had a chance to talk to YouTube celebrity JP Sears and do something fun for the cover. 
LOVED IT: City & Paper (2018) If you don’t know it, the ever-popular, southern fever dream Garden & Gun magazine is based right here in the Holy City. We couldn’t help ourselves spoofing them for some SEWE-season fun. 
HATED IT: Food Influencers (2018) What could be more meta and exciting than a photo of someone taking a food photo rather than just a photo of the food? I’ll tell you: A photo of someone taking a photo of something that isn’t food or even a glass of recognizable or colorful liquid. This still gives me the night sweats thinking of how lack-luster this concept turned out to be. 
LOVED IT: Charleston CVB ( 2018) A look at what the future could hold for the city. Apparently, this was executed well enough that some folks grabbed it off of the web and re-used the image thinking it was a real current photo of Charleston. 
LOVED IT: GoT (2019) Still one of my all-time favorite photo illustrations that blended the story theme with the current pop culture craze. 
HATED IT: Gadsden Creek (2019) An important story that needed highlighting, but it made for an extremely boring cover image — unless you’re a tidal creek fanboy. 
LOVED IT: Covid-19 shots (2021) I tried a new illustration technique on this one and it paid off with an illustration award.
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