Is Joe Lieberman...The Devil???

Here's a fun one I just drew for the New Haven Advocate. Editor John Stoehr phoned me during the week between Christmas and New Year's to ask if I could draw a cover illo featuring Connecticut's Senator Joe Lieberman. I was happy to oblige, since I've already drawn Lieberman a bunch of times over the years, and I'm typically much more relaxed sketching a craggy politician than I am struggling with likenesses of pretty television actors, (the AMC show "Mad Men" comes to mind for some reason).

The cover story would explain how Lieberman's efforts to stall the Senate Health Care bill weren't quite as self-serving as they'd seemed. This initially struck me as a tricky subject to communicate clearly in an illo. However, when John told me that the headline would be "The Devil In The Details," I was immediately struck with this "diabolical reflection in the mirror" concept, (or perhaps I should say "re-struck," since this mirror gimmick is as old as dirt). I threw together a quick sketch, which the New Haven Advocate folks rapidly approved, and I got cracking on the final art.

Once upon a time, I maintained a four drawer file cabinet stuffed with reference photos I'd clipped from countless magazines. Now, after nearly fifteen years of continuous internet use, my swipe file is entirely digital, and I turn reflexively to Google and Yahoo for an image search at the start of every job. While tooling around the web for fresh Lieberman photos, I noticed more than a few side-by-side comparisons of Connecticut's Senator with another Senator, Star Wars' arch villain Palpatine, (who was, as far as I'm concerned, the only interesting element in the last four Star Wars movies). As I perused various JPEGs of Lieberman juxtaposed with actor Ian McDiarmid, I thought, "nah, they don't look that much alike." In spite of that thought, after a few hours spent scratching away with my leaky rapidographs under a hot lamp, I started to get a little fuzzy on whose likeness I'd just drawn.

At any rate, while I haven't yet had a chance to read the New Haven Advocate's cover story, I suspect it fails to make the case that Lieberman is either a Devil or a hooded, latex-caked Sith Lord.