INTRODUCTION

an idea on a paper napkin. Now I was faced with a quandary. It was late on a Wednesday
night, but if we were going to do a cover about Diallo, it shouldn’t wait another week.
I hesitated but still called Remnick at home, even though it was past midnight. “Hi,
David, so sorry, but I just faxed you a crude sketch. Art has what I think is a good
idea.” I’m forever grateful to Remnick, who gave the okay without much more than the
roughest sketch and a verbal description. Art stayed up all night to do the drawing, and,
by the end of the next day, I sent the image to the printer.

THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT THE DIALLO SHOOTING was instantly reignited. The police
union called a protest outside of our offices: 250 off-duty police officers showed up.
The mayor, Rudy Giuliani, denounced the image to the press: “It’s a demonstration
of something I have been saying for some
time—that there is a virulent prejudice
against police officers.” A New York Post
editorial personally took the artist to task:
“If you are burglarized, or your family is
menaced by thugs, you should be consistent.
Call Al Sharpton instead of 911. See where
that gets you, Spiegelman, you creep.” In
the week after the cover ran, daily protests
against police brutality formed outside
police headquarters in Manhattan; they
eventually resulted in the arrest of 1,200
people, including former mayor David
Dinkins, actress Susan Sarandon, and the
Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Saul Steinberg once told me that what
he appreciated about this cover was that it
was “a picture of a picture.” The policeman
is the friendly 1940s neighborhood cop—a
cop who’s there to protect you, whose gun
is merely a reassuring prop. And while
the image makes reference to the Diallo
shooting, it takes us beyond the racial
dimension of the incident. Here none of the
policeman’s targets are black, or rather, they
all are—they are all silhouettes, jolly icons
of average New Yorkers. I appreciate how
difficult it is to make the late-night decision
to publish something that could spark this
kind of controversy (and to stand behind it

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