December 14th, 2003

“We clone covered him”: For those of you keeping score (actually, I hope no one else is wasting time doing this), the stop-the-presses, do-over covers this week of Time & Newsweek are the the tenth (count them, 10 - or 20% of all this year’s issues) Clone Covers of the year. Clone Covers, you may recall, is a rexblog term coined to designate those weeks when the two magazines look confusingly identical on the newsstand. (All 2003 Clone Covers are here.) It comes as no surprise what this week’s cover subject is, nor, for that matter, the image and headline chosen.


December 22, 2003

I have not yet read any “magazine-angle” stories on how Time or Newsweek had to scrap issues that were being printed, but as the magazines print after midnight on Saturday, I assume there are a lot of magazines with the cover seen below, left (still on the Time website Sunday afternoon) sitting in massive recycling bins at printers around the country. Would it be in bad taste if I commented on the weird similarity in composition and imagry of the original and replacement covers?


Original & replacement covers
December 22, 2003
Once was lost, but now found?

Okay, one last clone cover observation: I find it a bit strange that the first clone covers of the year (below) and this week’s clone covers, presumably the last of the year, all feature dictatorial madmen. Makes for a real anti-hero sandwich effect.


January 13, 2003