CELEBRITIES

ROBERT RISKO ON CARICATURING CELEBRITIES:

“I’ve always been able to draw people since the time I was five years old. I tried teaching a class for a while and I found it difficult—you just can’t teach people. I know other caricaturists and they, like myself, simply felt compelled to put down what they saw in other people’s faces. I don’t know if it’s a gift or a bodily function—it’s just something you have to do. I would rather draw people with graphic features—give me a blonde and I panic. I love strong shapes and sweeping contours.

“For The New Yorker, if they ever put a famous person on the cover, it has to be within the context of an idea, but to me, a strong likeness is already a concept. To me, some people are always a profile and others have a front-on face, like Palin. Certain celebrities like to be photographed from one side. Only a certain angle of Obama will show his big ears.

“Michael Jackson had just died and I wanted to create an emblematic logo of what he had turned himself into. People become beautiful when they get so scary looking. It’s a phenomenon. All icons do that. Even Marilyn Monroe when she got older, her hair went from dirty blond to blond to white, and then she became this vision of white with two black eyeliner lines.

“When people turn into icons—especially sinister ones—it’s always a red, black, and white theme. White face, black hair, and red. Michael wore a lot of red—he became Liza, Liz Taylor, the Nazi Party. And it had to be a skull face, a white skull—to me, he was an animated cadaver. There was also the Shroud of Turin—I wanted that. If there was any concept—but it’s important that it not be spelled out—it would be that it’s a death mask, MJ’s death mask.”

Since not having celebrity covers has long been one of
the hallmarks of The New Yorker, we think hard before
breaking that unspoken rule. Ultimately we decided that
not having a Michael Jackson cover the week after he
died was still our best option.