Some of the most coveted real estate for any illustrator — probably the most coveted  — is the New Yorker cover, and this week, for I believe the second time, the owner is Marcellus Hall, with whom I ran cross country at Washburn High School in Minneapolis in the early 1980s.  He lives in Brooklyn now. You can view his Web site here. You can view his MySpace page, and listen to his music, here.

Amazingly talented even back then. Somewhere I have an old Marc drawing titled “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” and delineating what we considered our predicament: a skinny, geeky dude sitting by himself, while a bulbous, dopey football player is surrounded by admiring girls.

The New Yorker cover is titled, in typically dry New Yorker fashion, “Green Christmas.”