In my 30+ year as an illustrator, cartoonist and designer, I doubt I ever had the audacity to look at a sketch and think "hmmm, this might work for The New Yorker".

That all changed in 2006.

I looked around at what was happening first in my little town of Chatham, Massachusetts, then in Cape Cod, then virtually this entire country -- the houses were getting gigantic, homes suddenly needed 5 bathrooms, and if you didn't build on a "great room" with 30'-plus ceilings, well, you had to be a real loser. Some journalist along the way coined the term McMansion to describe these behemoths of suburbia, so I started playing around with ideas.

Here in Chatham, 200+-year-old homes along the Atlantic were being torn down and replaced with buildings that better resembled lavish funeral parlors, not modest cottages. Hmmmm. The mental image got me thinking -- about the mid-20th Century advertising posters of A.M. Cassandre, a graphic genius who employed a variety of sweet visual effects to create his art. So many artists of a generation ago -- Cassandre, Jean Carlu, Paolo Garretto, Mary Blair, even Paul Rand -- have inspired and informed my work in subtle and overt ways, so when I thought about the McMansions sprouting up on Cape Cod, it was a no-brainer to liken them to one of Cassandre's hulking, uber-heroic steamships.

I sat down and did a digital interpretation of Cassandre's most infamous image -- the head-on ocean liner from his 'Normandie' poster, situated it ON the outer beach of Cape Cod, added a few cedar-shingled additions to the deck, installed bedroom windows on the hull, and to accentuate the size of the hulking structure, a small door was added to the bow and a smattering of modest beach cottages were placed along either side of the scene.

The title? 'S.S. Beach Cottage'.

I added The New Yorker masthead to the image, printed it out, then sent it off to Françoise Mouly, the magazine's infamous director of covers.

I didn't expect anything, really. i had known illustrators who'd been submitting cover ideas to The New Yorker for years and with no luck, so the idea that the first thing I submitted to the magazine would go anywhere other than the trash can was, well, dreaming. The best I could hope for was that the image -- one alluding to the work of France's greatest mass-appeal artists -- would somehow catch Françoise's attention. If ONLY that happened, taking the time to create the image would have alone been worth it.

Three days later, an email comed from Françoise saying she "loved" the piece and would present it to New Yorker Editor David Remnick, but there would be "no guarantee that he will be as enthusiastic as I am about your work." I sent her the high-resolution artwork and, boom, they accept it. A check arrives, and I'm told that it's slated for the last week of August, but am reminded that you "just never know" at The New Yorker, so "there's a chance the piece won't make it as a cover".

I'll end it there -- so you can click and this was really my first New Yorker cover, or if it never saw print.

Bob Staake's New Yorker Covers:

Foot In The Door June 2, 2008	Santa's Little Schleppers Dec 17, 2007	Bright Idea Jul 2, 2007

The Wind-Up Oct 23, 2006	Back To Cool Sept 4, 2006	Unclear On The Concept (Intended for Dec 2007)

S.S. Beach Cottage (Intended for Aug 2006)	The Lift Lane (Intended for Jan 2008)

'S.S. Beach Cottage' (above) was the first cover I submitted to The New Yorker and it was also the first thing they accepted -- but let's give credit where credit is due: The piece is a parody of a famous poster by A.M. Cassandre and it is our familiarity with the image that made this idea work.

See ALL The New Yorker covers from 2006 by ALL artists