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Happy New Year, Obama Baby!
When we started developing Mother Jones' January/February 2009 cover, we were looking for a way to depict President-elect Barack Obama in a lighthearted way, while acknowledging the mammoth task he has ahead of him the minute he assumes office. After rejecting numerous ideas, including one of Hercules shoveling dung out of the Augean stables (you're welcome!), we were intrigued by the image of Obama as an innocent New Year's baby (the thinking being that "innocence" can mean "not guilty" of said mess, but can also imply "inexperienced.")
I arrived at Norman Rockwell's predecessor at the Saturday Evening Post, illustrator J.C. Leyendecker, who blogger Charley Parker claims to be the source of the New Year's baby metaphor. Aside from having developed the "Arrow shirt man" (reportedly a likeness of Leyendecker's partner of 48 years, Charles Beach), and Saturday Evening Post covers throughout the first half of the 20th century, it seems that Leyendecker created the New Year's baby image for a 1908 Post cover and continued to explore variations on that theme until his very last cover, on their January 2, 1943, issue.
The American Art Archives site points out that there's a tradition of homages to Leyendecker:
The poster art for the film The Sting owed a lot to Leyendecker, and that poster itself was parodied by Norman Mingo for Mad magazine.
For our purposes, we were particularly intrigued by a 1935 cover on which a nervous-looking baby walks a tightrope in an effort to balance the budget.
To develop our Obama baby, I chose illustrator Dale Stephanos; his characters have a strong presence on the page and fine-tuned expressions, featuring dramatic lighting that sometimes looks as if it comes from inside the subject. He sketched Obama with several expressions and at one point tried a top hat; the sketch we finally chose shows our intrepid harbinger balanced but understandably nervous as he begins to take his next step.
—Tim J Luddy
The retention of what looks to be a Japanese-style rising sun in the background from the 1935 SEP cover is an interesting choice. Surely the folks in charge of balancing the budget in 1935 were concerned about the world's new poster-child for Empire (pre-Axis, militaristic Japan)encroaching on tin- and rubber-rich American and European colonies in Southeast Asia. The 1935 cover, however subconsciously seems to have been playing on Americans' Orientalist fears. Unfortunately those illbegotten, misplaced fears still remain. Of course, instead of a rising sun, a more appropriate symbol for those fears nowadays might be a crescent moon.
After having looked over the Leyendecker new year baby SEP cover archives, I get the feeling that what I called a "rising sun" in my last comment is definitely an iteration of an Art Deco motif which the artist had been using for years. I still hold that the big, red halo of the SEP cover of 1935 must have reminded more than a few readers, then, of the new menace in the East, a threat to Western colonial holdings and burgeoning economic developments in places like French Indochina, and the Philippenes.
Thanks for sharing the research behind-the-scenes. Although, I must admit that the thumbnail shot of Rachel Maddow was what made me grab the issue from the shelf...