Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545081
8 4 P E R S P E C T I V E M AY / J U N E 2 0 2 6 Spider-Noir gave me a chance to do what only a lucky handful of Graphic Designers has ever had the chance to do, which is redesign the look of a pop culture icon. When I started on the show, we knew we had a decent amount of prep time, but we also knew we had a LOT to work on. Production Designer Warren Young and Art Director Mark Larkin told me at the outset that he wanted the show to look and feel as realistic as possible, not comic book style: We're in the real world telling this story. The show is set in 1933, and not JUST 1933, it is set on the eve of the 1933 World Series, October 3, and showrunner Oren Uziel wanted to make sure our newspaper looked and felt like something a depression-era New Yorker may have held in his hands, and so wanted the back pages to include daily updates on the Series. Exciting, but it was going to take a little work. The Mighty Masthead To help sell 1933, I wanted to give the Bugle an instantly arresting sense of place and time, so I had to find graphic signifiers that avoided any feeling of contemporary print layouts and styles. Top of that list, and top of the page, was the masthead. Knowing that I was treading on sacred comic book ground, one of my first tasks was to seek out what the Daily Bugle's masthead had looked like in all its prior film and TV incarnations. From Marvel comics beginning in the 1960s, to the CBS series in the 1970s, to the 2000s Sony movies and ultimately, to today's Marvel Studios films, the Daily Bugle has had a rich history of artistic reinvention, from a newspaper to a tabloid, a web publication and even a video web series. I acquired screen shots of as many of the previous Bugle mastheads as possible, so that ours might possibly pay tribute to the earlier work, while at the same time, looking like it may have actually been their spiritual grandfather. The chosen favorite of my many initial designs was a masthead inspired less by the Bugle's predecessors in pop culture and more by the historical context. The 1920s and early 1930s, apart from being awash in the Great Depression and Prohibition, were just a stone's throw in memory from World War I, and a great many periodicals and newspapers of the time still bore the scars. War memorials were cropping up everywhere in tribute to the Great War, as it was called at the time, and some newspaper front pages still draped patriotic bunting and other graphic regalia saluting the fallen. A. THE 1933 DAILY BUGLE'S MASTHEAD B. THE MAYOR, PLAYED BY MICHAEL KOSTROFF, GETS BAD NEWS. PRODUCTION STILL C. DAILY BUGLE BUG. GRAPHIC LAYOUT. Warren Alan Young, Production Designer Mark Larkin, Super vising Art Director Rebekah Killam, Brian Jewell, Christina Eunji Kim, Art Directors Arifa Chand, Toi Whitaker Assistant Art Directors Eugene Adamov (Lead), Brooke Peters, Dylan Reed, Elizabeth Thinnes, Set Designers Andres Parada, Concept Designer James Bolenbaugh, Illustrator Steven Samanen (Lead), Audrey Zaldumbide, Carly Sertic, Eric Rosenberg, Graphic Designers Jay Martin, Stor yboard Artist Halina Siwolop, Set Decorator B A C