Martin Schneider, our trusty Squib Reporter, writes:

Our friends over at FLOG! (that’s Fantagraphics’ blog) are excited
about David Heatley’s cover this week. Heatley’s work is very interesting. He had a running series in the Fantagraphics anthology Mome called “Overpeck” (soon to be a full-fledged graphic novel) that was a somewhat surrealistic treatment of childhood and suburbia; it would merit the term (David) Lynchian. Heatley’s contribution to McSweeney’s 13, the vaunted comix issue edited by Chris Ware, was called “Portrait of my Dad”; it was about as unflinching and profoundly moving as contemporary comix get.

Heatley’s Achilles’ heel, if he has one, is that the drawing isn’t always very pretty. When I heard that The New Yorker had commissioned a cover from him, I confess my first thought was to wonder whether, stripped of narrative and the latitude to be so powerfully affecting, Heatley’s work would function well in that setting. Having now seen the cover, I’m happy to see that it’s very good.

A reader adds: Just a few days ago the Poetry Foundation’s website published Heatley’s comic-strip adaptation of a poem by Diane Wakoski, the first in a series inviting cartoonists to adapt poems of their choice from the Foundation’s archives.