Kirk Lyttle

I've been reading the St. Paul Pioneer Press for...hmmm...at least 14 years, probably longer. And for much of that time I've looked forward to the illustration work of Kirk Lyttle. The graphic style he brings to his work is always fun to see. Here are a couple of samples that I've had in the filing cabinet for years -- one from 1995 and the other from 2001.

The 1995 illo is for an article called Mixed Marriages, but it's not what you think -- it's about vegetarians who marry meat-eaters. I love how he made use of animal archetypes without resorting to cliche, partly because the colors and angles in the picture just don't let it become one.



The 2001 illustration is for an article called Everyday Zen. I didn't keep the article on this one, so I can't say what it was about exactly, except that at the time I thought the illustration fit it perfectly.



I may post a few more of Kirk's pieces in the future, but these two have been in the filing cabinet way too long. Time to get them out for some air.

Kirk Lyttle: Grace Under Fire

It's been a while since I've heaped any praise on Pioneer Press illustrator Kirk Lyttle, one of a few reasons I still subscribe to the increasingly strident, right-wing newspaper that covers our capital city. The other reasons are economics columnist Ed Lotterman and David Steinlicht's In This Corner cartoon. Oh, and Hilary Price's Rhymes with Orange and Dan Piraro's Bizarro comics, too. I appreciate Julio Ojeda-Zapata and Ruben Rosario, as well, but it seems as though neither one writes very frequently, Rosario for obvious reasons.

But I digress. The subject was Kirk Lyttle.


Yesterday's illustration is a cheeky mix of subversive feminism and artistic talent. I couldn't help laughing at Polly pilgrim's crazed expression and how perfectly it captures the feeling I've had when  cooking for a crowd.

Completely undermining the headline (unless her name is Grace, I don't see any grace in this image), the art also pokes fun at the year-in, year-out tradition of newspapers writing up the same damned story about Thanksgiving preparations.

A+ for Kirk Lyttle this Thanksgiving.

Kirk Lyttle Redux

I've written before about Pioneer Press illustrator Kirk Lyttle. His illo for today's Travel section, accompanying a story called Not Their Parents' Vacation, called out to me to write about him again. The story discusses baby boomers' predilection for "achievement travel" -- searching for adventures off the beaten path, learning something new, and swapping houses, among other trends.

Lyttle's atmospheric use of layers is wonderful, and I particularly like his understated use of color. As always, his depiction of lively and funky body shapes adds interest. The print version of the illustration covers about two-thirds of the Travel front page, with the headline and intro text laid out over the background hill, so overall it makes a very nice package.

Initially I disliked the tiny running figure of a native boy, leading the tourist's burro -- in fact, it pretty much ruined the whole image for me. But then I decided that Lyttle was actually critiquing the boomer tourist who is looking for the "exotic," riding along in relative comfort while the barefoot native child does all the work. This is consistent with the tone of the article in some places: boomers, the author tells us, are interested "in seeking out what's undiscovered -- in their own social circle, at least"; or boomers "see travel as a right and not a privilege. They have high expectations and demands" (the latter quote is from a travel agent source in the story).

I may be wrong about this interpretation, but after looking at Lyttle's work for almost two decades, I think I have a sense of his point of view. So thanks, Kirk, for another great illustration.

Kirk Lyttle Gets into the Spirit

Another fine illustration from today's Pioneer Press by Kirk Lyttle:


(Click to enlarge)

Spirit Airlines has just begun service to the Twin Cities. I gather they advertise very low prices and then charge you for everything they can think of... like your first carry-on bag or reserving a seat. Essentially, it's an above-board bait and switch tactic.

Lyttle's illustration combines a mosquitofied Spirit plane and a swarm of flying nickels and dimes, about to make a meal of an apprehensive air traveler.

Kirk Lyttle's Food Fight

Another nice illustration by Kirk Lyttle in Sunday's Pioneer Press for a business section article about changes in market share among Twin Cities grocery stores since Target, WalMart and Aldi have entered the market.

Active composition, mixed media and intermingled type -- it just jumped off the page!

Eddie Thomas Assaults My Eyes

It's hard to compare with Pioneer Press illustrator Kirk Lyttle. It appears I've written about him 11 times since I started this blog. As a reminder, here's one of his pieces from today's paper:


Character, charm, color, composition -- all of the Cs in one page. And humor -- did you catch the Wisconsin-shaped thought balloon behind the cheese wedge?

Maybe the Star Tribune's Eddie Thomas could call and ask for lessons. I started shooting photos of Thomas's "art" a few months ago when I saw this piece:


Misshapen bodies (with no redeeming charm), boring composition, blah colors. Painfully hideous. And every time I look at it, I think the boomerang is the primary character's legs. Or something. I have to read the headline to understand what the illustration is trying to portray.

Then there was this:

What 12-year-old drew this? Clogged and confusing in the center, once again charmless, and while it's more colorful, it's just so... ugly.

And most recently this:


Shudder.

If Thomas were a photographer with equivalently bad work, there's no way he'd be working at a daily paper. It's not that I expect every illustrator to be Kirk Lyttle; work of minimally professional quality would be acceptable.

School House Mocks: Kirk Lyttle Strikes Again

You know all those school fundraisers -- selling wrapping paper and coupon books, holding book fairs, and hosting silent auctions?

Sunday's Pioneer Press (Oct. 18, 2009) did a nice roundup, defining them all, and Kirk Lyttle skewered the whole enterprise with his cover illustration:


(Click to see it larger.)

Finding the Good

It seems like there's been a lot of good stuff in the Pioneer Press lately. Sunday's paper had not one but two extra-large illustrations by Kirk Lyttle:



Ruben Rosario's column, in which he talked back to the xenophobic readers who assailed him for opposing "English-only" education, made for both amusing and dismaying reading. After starting out quoting Ben Franklin on how German immigrants were going to drive our country into the ground, Rosario ended the column with this observation from a volunteer English tutor:

"Practically anyone who has ever given even an hour of volunteer time in an ELL (English Language Learner) program knows that while English-only advocates like to preach English, they don't necessarily offer any assistance in actually teaching it," he said.

Once someone volunteers, "it's quickly seen that this is one area where demand exceeds supply," he added.

And there have been a number of articles and op-eds, some house-written, some from wire services, that have served up facts I never knew:

• 2.3 percent of Americans in good mental health committed a violent act in the previous year. (From an Los Angeles Times article on the incidence of violent crimes among people with mental illness.)
• "Last June, student debt surpassed credit card debt for the first time." (From an op-ed by Mark C. Taylor. More to come later this week on Dr. Taylor, who appeared on Kerri Miller's Midmorning MPR show today.)
• The civic health (volunteering, voting, interaction with neighbors) of the Twin Cities tops that of Miami. Not a super surprise. Except "...people with more education and income engage more in civic life. But individuals in Minneapolis-St. Paul in the lowest income group are more likely to be civically involved than are people in the wealthiest tier in Miami." (From an op-ed by Harry Boyte titled Spreading the Minnesota Way) Another reason not to model our state on Florida.
  

Oh, and I really liked the opinion piece about our health care system by Dr. Virginia Dale from the Sunday Star Tribune, too:

To come to terms with the crisis we will have to limit -- in more inflammatory terms, we will have to ration -- health care. The good news is that our fear of rationing is exaggerated by the inflated value the American public perceives in health care....

Why are we willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to stall and argue with death at the end of life, but aren't willing to spend that, or less, to educate a person earlier in his or her life, when it might truly enhance life's quality?....

The de facto purpose of modern health care, the enterprise, is not to maximize health, but to maximize medical technology. Like the silken-voiced computer HAL, this purpose has taken over the ship. In the current system, none of the actors -- physicians, insurance companies or individual patients -- can stop it....

We should collectively define our purpose -- by creating a basic package of health care benefits available to all, using tools to set reasonable expectations regarding cost and benefit. Services outside of that basic package could be purchased by individuals.

Would this create a two-tiered health care system? Yes, it would. Would it create two tiers of health? It would not. The parts of health care that matter would be provided to all, while the parts that don't matter that much -- well, they don't matter that much.

Vulcans Face Off in this Corner

(Click to see it larger)

In honor of the St. Paul Winter Carnival, the Pioneer Press reprinted this vulcanized In This Corner comic... a favorite from David Steinlicht's Corner Comic archive. (Also available in book form as Cornered! A Slightly Askew Look at Our Pop-Culture Landscape.)

This comic reminds me how much I appreciate cultural references that are most intelligible -- and therefore funniest -- to people who live in a specific location and have local knowledge. Not everything is generica.

Update: For a fan of another PiPress illustrator, Kirk Lyttle, I can be a bit slow on the uptake. I just found out today that Lyttle did the illustrations for this year's Winter Carnival buttons, and (no surprise) they're the best looking buttons the Carnival has had for at least 20 years. Go Kirk!


I hear the bouncing girl button is particularly popular because they have hardly ever been shown on the buttons.

The Sad Story of the Pioneer Press, as Seen in Two Illustrations

I used to write about a wonderful illustrator who worked for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Kirk Lyttle. (My past posts can be seen here.) He made subscribing to the paper worth it, all on his own.

Kirk took the buyout a number of years ago, and as with most other things at the PiPress since it was sold to extractive capital, the design and illustration have gone down hill (if not off a cliff).

Case in point, the illustration on the front of the Life section this Sunday:


The story is about stage blood and how to do it right (a Halloween topic). Unfortunately, the illustration does it all wrong.

• The color contrast is so poor that you can't even discern the character's right arm and hand (one the left side of the illustration).
• The incredibly busy area below the SEEING RED headline is unintelligible at a glance. After studying it for a while, I figured out it's supposed to portray a person with light blue hair wearing a pink and white mask and holding a flask that looks like a bubble, standing in front of a brown-draped background. The dark arc on the light blue hair is supposed to be the mask's strap. I'm still not sure what the pinkish blob below the chin is supposed to be... part of a tie, maybe?
• It looks as though there's a hole in the person's chest, with a beam of light or something shooting downward into the red liquid... but I think instead it's supposed to be a spoon coming up out of the liquid, and the dark oval on the end of the spoon handle is just supposed to be a knob... or something like that.

Whatever.

The illustrator is credited as Mary Hilleren / Special to the Pioneer Press, which means in newspaper usage that she is not employed by the Pioneer Press but was hired as a commissioned illustrator. I think that's actually worse than if she were an employee attempting to do illustrations that are clearly beyond her skill level.

Hilleren also did another illustration in late summer (which I don't think had a credit), which was almost worse:


It didn't have the same color contrast problems (I can discern each badly conceived part of it very clearly, partly because she put black outlines on the figures), but the drawing and composition are just so clueless and unprofessional.

In looking into this, I found that Mary Hilleren is not just a freelance illustrator for the PiPress, though: she's also doing page layout, which used to be a full-time job at the paper, employing multiple people. So I think what happened was the paper lost or eliminated all or almost all of their design and layout staff, and they are making do with contractors who work very cheap and occasionally improvise their own illustrations.

The shame is on the newspapers' owners, rather than this particular person, who is doing the best she can. But still. Ugh.

Why do I pay the owners of the Pioneer Press money for a subscription at this point, if they are going to serve up juvenile content like this? I guess I maintain my sub to get the little bit of St. Paul-specific news still written by their few staff reporters (like Fred Melo and Bob Shaw). And to keep Rubén Rosario in health insurance. (I used to like reading Julio Ojeda-Zapata's thoughts on tech, but I guess he's running their website these days, so no more words from him.) That's about it.

We all know that newspapers are trapped in a burning business model, but the ownership of the Pioneer Press has made it a thousand percent worse than it has to be. One of these days I will have to figure out if it's worth it.

Sunday Pioneer Press Goodness

Today's Sunday paper comparison was won, hands down, by the Pioneer Press with three notable stories plus an excellent Kirk Lyttle illustration (right).

Payouts for Unused Sick Time Spike did a good job of discussing a complicated issue. It included both facts that will outrage some (one former MNSCU president got over $120,000 in unused sick time when he retired) and others that provide balance (the money is put into a Health Savings Account and used to cover the fact that most workers don't get any post-retirement health insurance). Also this: "the payments make up less than 1 percent of what the state spends on salaries and benefits..."

Obviously, having a policy like this discourages abuse of sick days, which is all to the good. It's also arguable that it offsets wages that are generally lower than the private sector, at least in many job categories.

Since the payments are based on the wages of each employee, the people with the biggest payouts were the more highly paid managers, administrators and faculty who worked for decades and took little sick time. The average AFSCME member (which represents snow plow drivers, University department clerks and all the folks at the DMV) retired with just $3,587, which won't cover anyone's health care cost for very long.

In "More for Less" to Prevent Crime? Ruben Rosario showed that he has been reading the studies that come across his desk again. This time it's an economists' look at crime and imprisonment in the U.S.

No one wants to return to the crime rates we had before the 1990s, but our current incarceration rate is higher than acceptable for a democratic republic, and financially unsustainable to boot. The researchers propose rolling the average prison sentence length back to 1984 levels. This would reduce the prison population by 400,000, saving $12 billion (out of a total $70 billion).

They would reallocate that money into three areas:

• More police on the streets
• More funding for Head Start and other early childhood education
• More intervention with young offenders

The cost-benefit ratio of each of those is described. The most impressive, to me, was the idea to provide "functional family therapy" to 300,000 young people on juvenile probation. "FFT costs approximately $2,500 per youth, with a benefit-to-cost ratio that may be as high as 25 to 1 from crime reductions alone."

Finally, Ed Lotterman gives his usual nuanced economic analysis, this time saying Defense, Corporate Spending Can't Be Compared. Defense spending in real dollars is up, way up -- but as a percent of GDP, it's lower than it was during almost all of the Cold War, let alone World War II.


But it's also notable that defense spending bottomed out 1998-2001 and has on an upward track until recently. Some of Lotterman's words:

At some $750 billion, inflation-adjusted spending in fiscal 2011 for military programs of the Department of Defense is at its highest in the past 50 years.

It is more than twice as much as in any fiscal year from 1996 through 2001 and is up $70 billion, or 11 percent, from FY 2009, the last Bush administration budget....

...[the proposed] cuts are from projected levels of outlays that would take place if force levels stayed near current and all scheduled hardware purchases went ahead. Such "cuts" are not the same as actual reductions from this year's spending levels.

This is all background to Lotterman's main point, which is that the Pentagon doesn't operate like a normal business. It has no balance sheet, and doesn't use accrual accounting. This means that equipment purchased in a given year is an expense in that year only, even if the equipment lasts for 30 years, or the bombs aren't used for a decade.

Defense outlays from 2003–2009 understated the true cost of defense because we were using up stocks of ammunition and other expendables and wearing out tanks, Humvees and other Army and Marine Corps machinery much faster than we were replacing them. Even ships and planes not heavily engaged in the war aged. We are catching up by rebuilding war stocks.

He ends by saying he would be willing to maintain current military spending levels if we also went back to the tax levels of the '80s and '90s.

I would also point out another way that the Defense Department is unlike a normal business: It is unauditable. So there's no way to know what happens with any of the money we spend there.

International Adoption -- to Think or Not to Think About It?

The Minnesota Women's Press recently featured an article on the difficult topic of international adoption. Written by Katie Leo, an adult Korean adoptee who had herself considered adopting internationally, the story looked at the issue from many perspectives, and concluded that it is hard to reconcile the tenets of feminism with adopting internationally. In the same issue, MWP editor Michele St. Martin shared her perspective as an adoptive parent of two girls from China.

The most recent issue of MWP includes a number of letters from adoptees, birthmothers, and adoptive mothers. Some are more thoughtful than others, but I didn't appreciate the depth contained in even the most shallow MWP letter until I read a more mainstream article on international adoption in the Pioneer Press last Saturday, December 13.

Titled "Our New Daughter" and written by Maren Longbella, a contributor to the PiPress's new MinnMoms community blog, the story, which is actually a series of blog posts, tells of Longbella's trip with "the Husband" to pick up their child. Their new daughter is 2 years old (old enough to realize she is being removed from everything she knows), and had been part a loving foster family for almost her entire life. The story is excruciating to read, especially through the lens of Katie Leo's story and the other commentaries in the MWP.

There are hints that Longbella questions what she's doing, but no real examination of it. I think she probably thought, Well, we're here, we have to go through with it. After all, we came all this way to get a baby.

Looking at Longbella's writings on MinnMoms, it appears she has an older adopted child as well as a 2-year-old biological child. Here's what she says about her reasons for adopting: "The Husband and I chose to adopt because neither of us had a burning desire to replicate ourselves, we had a house that was too big for just us, and we wanted to. And I thought a trip to China would be way better than being in labor." Although the last sentence is, I think, a cringe-inducing joke, the part that says "we wanted to" seems honest and straightforward, and clearly reveals her lack of awareness of her privileged position in the world.

After I finished the story, I thought back on how much more thought-provoking the MWP coverage of the topic was, and appreciated the paper's existence. Thanks to Katie Leo, Michele St. Martin, and all the others who shared their perspectives on this complicated topic.

(I liked Kirk Lyttle's illustration that accompanied Longbella's story, though. I think it communicates the powerlessness and anger of the child in the arms of the gigantic, somewhat faceless American woman.)

Half-Baked Layout with Less than Half an Illustration

I've posted pretty frequently about some of my favorite illustrators, like the Pioneer Press's Kirk Lyttle (here, here, here and here and, oh yeah, here) and the Star Tribune's L.K. Hanson (here and here). Maybe I write about them too much?

But when I see an indifferent illustration like the one that took up most of Monday's Variety front in the Star Tribune, my love of good illustrators makes a lot more sense:


The story is from the New York Times, and the art is by Charles Bloom of the Kansas City Star, via MCT, a newspaper-based stock art service. And it is one lame, lifeless piece of art.

I usually like flat-color art, but this is flat in a boring way. Its composition is static, and the faceless woman with the pointy extremities is just odd without any endearing details. Even the hues are boring -- her skin tone is so similar to the color of her hat-cookie and tube top it might almost as well be the same (except then she wouldn't be wearing a shirt, which would be a different kind of problem).

I started to wonder who Charles Bloom is, and whether his work is generally weak or if perhaps this piece wasn't representative of his body of work. (He wouldn't be the first bad illustrator employed by a daily newspaper, afterall.) On his personal website, I found out Bloom is no longer at the Star, and while I wouldn't add him to my list of great illustrators, he's much better than the cookie woman illo would lead me to believe.

Finally, digging around in the murkiness of his site's Flash interface, I found the original layout where the cookie woman was used, and it began to make sense. She was actually a background part of a larger illustration, so the lack of detail is more acceptable. The figure in the foreground, while still faceless and pointy, has a lot more visual interest, and the composition is much more dynamic.

The problem started when someone cut up the image to focus on this single background figure, and I can only assume that decision was made at the Star Tribune. So not only did they not bother to do an original piece for the story, they managed to make a decent illustrator look bad in the process.

Way to go, features department. The best I can say is, at least you made the deadline.