WORST MAGAZINE COVER . . . EVER?

Visitors to the offices of Jann Wenner on Sixth Avenue and 51st Street will be treated to the sight of the many National Magazine Awards the magazines of Wenner Media have collected over the years, many of them quite justifiably for the art direction of Rolling Stone. Well, they won’t be winning any art direction awards this year, and they’ll be lucky if ASME doesn’t try to claw some back. Rolling Stone has just produced a hideous magazine featuring four of the stars of Mad Men, four people who, one would think could not be made to look bad, but who look collectively wretched in this picture. We’re guessing that the four performers were photographed separately or nearly so, and then the four pics were photo-shopped together, with other techniques to enhance the image and give it the look of a single picture. Fair enough–we’ve seen Time and GQ and others do that recently. But here the processes were astonishingly, amateurishly botched. The facial expressions on Jon Hamm, Christina Hendricks and January Jones look Botoxed. Only Elisabeth Moss looks natural, or reasonably so, but she has her own problems, having been dramatically hourglassed in post-production, and, like Jones, become the recipient of snake legs. Moss’s left leg is–where, exactly? Jones’ right leg seems to be extending as though it was made of Silly Putty, and her left arm just melds, Siamese Twin-like, with Hamm’s oddly-shadowless right arm. With him holding a drink in that hand, it makes you wonder if Jones’ where Jones’ hand is–delicately slipped into the rock glass, perhaps?