Writer: Françoise MoulyPublisher: AbramsReviewer: Jason SacksReview Rating: A couple of years ago at Wondercon I ended up hanging out a bit with Shannon Wheeler, of Too Much Coffee Manfame, among other creations. Well, we fans of great, fun, indy comics think of Shannon as the TMCM guy, and he deserves all the fame he gets for that great series. But Shannon had another dream, the ultimate dream of a certain type of cartoonist: he wanted to be in The New Yorker. Yes, our fun, goofy, semi-underground cartoonist from Portland was anxious to move away -- at least creatively - from the quiet, provincial intellectual and bohemian life of the Rose City to join the oh so patrician world of intellectual elites sipping their organic fair trade shade grown micro grown coffee on Sunday morning in their tony Upper East Side digs while chortling quietly at the good, good humor of Garrison Keillor and Barry Blitt.But a funny thing happened on the way to the intellectual elite: they didn't just accept our friend Mr. Wheeler; they embraced him with open arms. Shannon has started a nice career submitting cartoons to The New Yorker, and has sold a happy number of them already. Oh, he's no Charles Addams -- he's not yet a true mainstay for the magazine -- but he's started to fill his own unique niche.

How did The New Yorker allow a ragamuffin like Shannon into their midst? Blown Covers: New

Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See goes a long way in answering that question, making it

clear along the way that the stereotype that many of us have of The New Yorker is dead, dead wrong.As we find in this virtual tour through the morgue

of never-published sketches and cartoons, The New Yorker can be as cutting, nasty, scatological and

sexual in its pursuit of humor as any magazine. It just does so from a slightly different perspective.Much of that approach comes from art director Françoise Mouly, who had brought a much more

avant-garde approach to New Yorker cartoons and covers since she joined the staff of the magazine nearly 20 years ago. She encouraged her staff to experiment, to be cutting or nasty, to take smart sides in some of the major arguments of the day.

This book contains a collection of pieces that were rejected by the magazine, and they provide a fascinating look at the pieces that were nearly great. From Bob Zoell's clever pun.

This Barry Blitt piece succeeds completely in creeping me the fuck out.

While this Bob Staake piece is a pretty perfect little satire of how the two sides of the American political world perceived Barack Obama shortly after his election.