His "Making Dennis a Menace," "Rounding Up Lucy," "Shouting Down The Domestic Arts Czar," "Domestic Arts Czar" and "Al Distraction" were a part of a series sending up self-appointed judge of comics Al Sharpton.
Sometimes Isaiah would create an image for one of our stories.
We also started using public domain illustrations -- by scouring newspapers and magazines from the 1800s. But eventually we moved towards our own illustrations -- photos, sketches, paintings, etc.
Why?
I always argued that it was easy on the eye and broke up the same old same old of words, words, words.
The first illustration created by us for this site was created by Jess who felt Ava and C.I.'s TV pieces, being so popular, deserved their own illustration. This led to many illustrations -- usually a new one every two years for the TV pieces -- since Ava and C.i. have now been covering the media for 14 years.
Media coverage would also require screen snaps.
I always like our musical illustrations.
With some of our illustrations, they begged the question what did they mean?
Some, like the ones above, weren't even connected to an article they were matched with. That was okay with me. I was even for our brief comedy cards that popped up for a few weeks and were inspired, clearly, by the TV show LAUGH-IN.
Some pieces required illustrations specific to those features such as "Justice for Abeer and her family?"
Or a Judith Regan might end up in the news and we'd do an illustration.
Or someone important like Molly Ivins might pass.
Or we're doing a short story on the NSA spying and Ty says we should have the NSA employee online porn performers so we write the story and then go looking for an illustration. Guy below actually was (is?) an online porn performer. He was asking who wanted him to stick his finger up his ass and sniff it? We asked him if it was okay to take a screen snap, he said yes and we gave him a donation.
Or . . .
Somethings were historically important and demanded a photograph.
And others . . .
Of course we did illustrations of war resisters and Iraq Veterans Against the War members.
We covered a lot of products and that allowed us to use various images.
And some of the images we'd create ourselves.
We would gladly get the word out on an event.
We even ran an ad (that we tore out of a magazine, we weren't paid for running it) for a TV show we loved.
Mainly, we just covered things.
For regular features, we created illustrations. Mail bag, for example, resulted in this.
Other regular features resulted in these.
That last one was created by Betty's kids.
There were public domain photos released by The Library of Congress.
Above is Lena Horne, Greta Garbo in two pics, Ramon Navarro and Marlene Dietrich
There were other public domain photos.
Some photos were pure luck. A COMMON ILLS community member takes her kids to the downtown Dallas public library and, across the street, in front of City Hall, a group (the Tea Party) is staging one of its early rallies.
Wally, Kat, Ava and C.I. attend many Congressional hearings. They sometimes grab a quick snap.
And when the people's attorney Lynne Stewart was wrongly imprisoned, we created an image to run with our coverage of her.
And when Bully Boy Bush occupied the White House we did "My Fascist House" -- a collage -- regularly.
I'd prefer we do our own illustrations.
