Your Unnecessary Spot Illustration of the Day, Nobel Edition

Reading from left to right in the row of framed caricatures is Kenzaburo Oe, Toni Morisson, Seamus Heaney and Wislawa Szymborska, all of whom won the Nobel Prize for literature. This was drawn about ten years ago for a New Yorker piece on the backstage hijinks at the Nobels, here depicted as a brawling mass of distinguished gentlemen. Evidently the actual process of determining who wins the Nobel for literature, so dignified on the outside, is inside like a that Three Stooges short where a well-mannered dinner party devolves into a pie fight. It was a joy to draw that brawling mass, though it probably took me a while to lay it out so that it made visual sense (drawing crowd scenes or even groups of more than three people is not one of my favorite things). But this tangle of people came out well enough that I reused one of them, the airborne berserker on the right, when I drew something on Senate hijinks for the New Yorker a few years later.

The caricatures of the Nobel laureates are Okay though I wish I'd pushed them a little further, but the rioting Nobel committee still makes me happy.