Another illo for the Publisher’s Weekly “Soapbox” column. This installment was a funny editorial was written by Mike Reiss, who has been a writer for The Simpsons for nineteen years. In an effort to reach kids with a different message than he does on TV, Mike has published eight children’s books, and enjoys the freedom of being the sole storyteller. But he doesn’t do it for the money:

“To earn what I make as a TV writer, I’d have to publish a children’s book every four hours.”

Money isn’t everything though…but Homer Simpson has weighed in on this:

“Bart, with $10,000, we’d be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of useful things like…love!”

The story for this month’s Soapbox in Publisher’s Weekly was a pretty fascinating one. Ben Cheever (son of John Cheever) writes about two seemingly unrelated topics: running and seeking the truth. Yet they come together in a most interesting way in his life.
Having just written a book about running (“Strides“), Cheever talks about how in his family of runners, running together lead to moments of surprising honesty because “the brain doesn’t get enough oxygen to support a falsehood”.
I was struck by the mention of his family’s deepest secret, his father’s bisexuality (thus the closet imagery) which lead to the idea for the illustration.
You can see more of my work for Publisher’s Weekly here.