Radar magazine’s Maer Roshan has brought legendary adman and cover designer George Lois out of retirement to design the issue’s September/October issue, on sale August 16th. The cover will be a riff on the 1968 Esquire cover Louis did with Muhammed Ali.
When Lois saw Radar writer Kim Masters’ investigative piece on Tom Cruise and his relationship with Scientology, he was reminded of the April 1968 Esquire cover which showed Ali as Saint Sebastian. Louis convinced Ali to pose as a martyr, wounded and near death but still holding on. Back then, Esquire’s editor Harold Hayes was deluged with angry letters and the cover was denounced on the Senate floor. But now, with everything a parody of its former self, a new parody will grace the cover of Radar with Tom Cruise appearing as Ali did on the April 1968 cover.
Sounding like the old codger he probably is, Lois said of today’s magazines, “Magazines don’t even try to do covers with actual ideas any more. I get calls from these big magazine conferences — always some big goddamn deal — and they’re always the same thing: ‘Could you come down, George, and make a speech about why all magazine covers suck?’ Screw that! Everybody knows that already! You can’t just slap a picture of Nicole Kidman on your cover and expect people to say, ‘Wow! What a cover!’ It’s just another picture of Nicole. Who gives a shit?”
Well we sure don’t Lois but if copying an old 1968 cover is supposed to be some sort of original idea, we just don’t get it.
