“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.
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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?
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.
December 15th, 2003 at 9:33 am
>Original & replacement covers: December 22, 2003
>Once was lost, but now found?
With your theological training, you surely appreciate the subtle and not so subtle sermon possibilities of comparing these two covers. E.G.: “We got him, but do YOU have HIM?”
December 16th, 2003 at 6:48 am
Yes, you are right, Bill. But my brief career in the theology business never included sermonizing…that all came later. But I could riff a thousand words on what the two covers together say. Unfortunately, a certain managing editor is badgering me for some real edit.
December 16th, 2003 at 7:36 am
make that TWO managing editors…