New Illustration: Blind Spot
I illustrated the cover to last week's OC Weekly for a story entitled Blind Spot. John Chamberlain, who was in jail for child pornography charges, was brutally murdered by up to 20 prisoners. It was the first murder in an OC prison in 18 years and there is reason to believe the guards ordered a beating on him.
Child molesters and rapists don't usually get off lightly in prison. Murderers, Gangbangers, and armed robbers apparently feel morally superior to those people and beat the shit out them regularly. Chamberlain was not in prison for molesting any children himself, but having nude photos of children he somehow obtained.
Unfortunately I lost all my cover sketches so I can only show you the finals.
click to enlarge
And here are three spots detailing scenes in the story. In the first, he made a call to his ex-girlfriend, trying to get his public defender to get him in protective custody. He was feeling threatened by both the inmates and the guards. The second shows the guards in their little control tower at the center of the cell block. They can monitor everywhere except for a few blind spots where they took Chamberlain to die (hence the title of the article). The final one shows his beaten body and an inmate with a pencil. After they beat him for 20 minutes a few inmates pissed on him and one sodomized him with a pencil. nice crew of guys.
click to enlarge
Child molesters and rapists don't usually get off lightly in prison. Murderers, Gangbangers, and armed robbers apparently feel morally superior to those people and beat the shit out them regularly. Chamberlain was not in prison for molesting any children himself, but having nude photos of children he somehow obtained.
Unfortunately I lost all my cover sketches so I can only show you the finals.
click to enlarge
click to enlarge
posted by Matt Bors at
11:25 PM
7 Comments:
Matt,
I've been wondering who drew this cover... I want to know why, when John Chamberlain was murdered by at least 16 white inmates, you chose to depict angry Mexicans? Anyone looking at this would assume he was murdered by hispanics. This cover makes me sick because it is contradictory to the story, and flagrantly racist so much so, that I will NEVER pick-up another OC Weekly, nor spend my advertising dollars with your paper again.
Syna Allahbakhshi
Orange County
Settle down.
First of all, it is not MY paper.
When I was given the initial draft of the story, it seemed like the gang was hispanic. I never saw any pictures of the accused and no one ever requested the art to be changed so that's how it ended up. I live in Oregon and am not familiar with the story.
There's not a big racist agenda going on.
This comment has been removed by the author.
It "seemed" like they were hispanic? Because it was a gang story? Haha, you're funny. You say there was no racist agenda, and you're right - you're just a racist.
Doing cover art carries a responsibilty to depict a scenario that closely relates to the story. If you don't see that then you're also dumb.
It's very easy just simply label someone a racist when you don't want to understand an explanation for why something happened the way it did.
No, I did not assume, as you assert, that they were hispanic simply because it was a prison gang. I skimmed the article for details on my tight deadline and there were mention of Mexican gangs when explaining the structure of prison gangs and how they relate to the guards. I did not see the pictures of the accused until I recieved the paper in the mail. I do not live in OC and am not familiar with the story.
Even if I wanted to depict them as mexican for no other reason than to be racist, you'd think someone at the paper would ask me to correct it. It's actually confusing how it got through the Editorial process without anyone suggesting the skin color be changed. The next week a new Editor and Art Director took over so they don't really know either.
I hope that explains it to you, but seeing your tone, I doubt it will do good to quash YOUR preconceived notion on this.
The OC is running a correction this week.
If you have any more questions or comments about this, e-mail me:
Mattbors
@
mattbors.com
I don't like to be called a racist when I'm not and I don't want to let you get off throwing that accusation at me when there is an explantion of what happened.
I just thought you had a thing against dudes with mustaches.
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