Our smart friend in comics sends this link from the cheerful and visually pleasing Cartoon Brew; click on the post to see the current New Yorker cover in all its deep rainy blue and bright yellow glory. Amid Amidi (who recently provided me with a copy of the animated version of James Thurber’s great “The Unicorn in the Garden”) writes:

Congrats to Lou Romano who painted the cover for this week’s New Yorker. Various illustrators who work in animation, like Peter de Sève, have done New Yorker covers before, but could this be the first time a trained animation artist has done a cover in the mag’s eighty-plus year history? The New Yorker is also selling prints of Lou’s cover here.

I think the implicit message in Romano’s cover is, If you want to be happier than Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross at the end of The Graduate, skip the bus and hail a cab instead. The triumphant last scene in Valley Girl comes to mind, too. I like how the skyscrapers here seem like a small crowd of friendly elders seeing off the newlyweds with benevolent pride.