This is what I love about Blown Covers, the new book by The New Yorker’s art editor, Francoise Mouly. Despite the title of the book, it is about more than just rejected covers. It gives us a peek into the process: creation, selection, and the decisions as to how a cover gets to be a cover.

The review posted on Forbes.com has several interesting covers that were never run.

Andrew Farago, the curator for the museum writes:

Love MAD? Our next exhibition is going to be the greatest collection of MAD art ever assembled, going all the way back to MAD #1. Kurtzman covers! Elder splash pages! Aragones! Berg! Richmond! Viviano! Mingo! Drucker! Davis! Jaffee! Martin! Get yourself to San Francisco between April and September, or kick yourself later!

Notes:

• Stay Tooned! is an old school magazine. He plans on producing an ebook format in the future
• 4 things you should NOT do in a cartooning career #1: Quit your job that provides health benefits
• Recounts his years working in movies and commercials and then in graphic design. Always had benefits
• Recounts story of Marcus Hamilton who was an illustrator working at Wal-Mart when he learned Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace) was going to retire
• Hustled to get samples of his work to Ketcham which resulted at him becoming the artist on the strip at age 51
• 4 things you should NOT do in a cartooning career #2: Publish a magazine about cartoons. There’s no money in it
• 4 things you should NOT do in a cartooning career #3. Do not volunteer to produce the NCS chapter newsletter
• 4 things you should NOT do in a cartooning career #4. Do not put on a show (exhibit)
• 12 things you should do:
• Attach yourself to someone (spouse) with a steady job, salary and health benefits
• Decide and record what you want to achieve. Write it down. Your goal.
• When early in your career, don’t get locked down into a specialty. Be flexible and open to opportunities
• Get business card and website
• Learn to draw caricatures. Be able to do quick sketches for people. When they learn you can draw, they often want to know if you can do caricatures
• Create a product that can be resold that shows people what you can do
• Network. Get away from the drawing table. Even in the “golden age” of comics, cartoonists had to hustle for work.
• Give back. Use your talents to lift people (hospitals, etc.)
• Public speaking. As a local cartoonist charge to come speak to groups
• Teach and Mentor
• Keep a sketchbook where ever you go. When an idea comes, you should record it.
• Read Stay Tooned!

The Atlantic, which expects to make about $18.6 million from advertising this year, or slightly more than half of its total revenue, said the growth in its online share of business was not because of a decline in the share of print revenue. It sold more ads in the October issue of the magazine than it had in any other issue since David Bradley bought it from Mortimer B. Zuckerman in 1999, Mr. Lauf said.

Executives at the magazine cited a strong brand as key to their success.

Bongo Comics is Matt Groening’s comic line and Serio has been contributing to Bongo Comics since 2009.

Look for “Sergio Aragones Funnies” in July.

Many magazines that are available on the iPad, such as Esquire, People and The New Yorker, have not posted their digital single-issue sales to the ABC. But Vanity Fair sold 8,700 digital editions of its November issue, down from its average of about 10,500 for the August, September and October issues. Glamour sold 4,301 digital editions in September, but sales dropped 20 percent in October and then another 20 percent, to 2,775, in November. GQ’s November edition sold 11,000 times, which was its worst performance since April (when the iPad was released) and represents a slight decline from its average digital sales of 13,000 between May and October.

“We have not been big believers in paywalls,” said Duncan McIntosh, president of Duncan McIntosh Company, Inc. (DMC), which publishes E&P. “Paywalls in name alone connote a psychological negative, which is one reason we have never been big believers. Nielsen had been using one for a number of years, but nothing during the past year has changed our opinion about them. We have removed it to build more traffic and make more of our original content available to our visitors.”

Second, E&P has promoted Adam Tessin to technology director. Tessin will perform a much-needed overhaul of the online site in the first quarter of 2011.

Aside from the usual debate about paywalls, I’m hoping this restores all the links I’ve created over the years that instantly broke once the story went behind the paywall.