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Bono has an unusual hobby: sketching fake magazine covers. Specifically that of the Atlantic.
Yes, Bono is into Atlantic cover fanfic — so much so that he was invited to illustrate the magazine’s June cover featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for a piece that argues how 2023 will bring a turning point for Ukraine’s fight for freedom and the West’s responsibility to that struggle.
Editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg discovered Bono’s curious habit while visiting the singer in his Dublin home last year. The magazine had profiled the U2 singer, and Bono wanted to show them how he had been expanding his artistic ambitions into visual art. “He just walks around with an iPad and sketches everything,” Goldberg recalled.
Via email, Bono writes “I learned to draw and paint on photographs from my father, who put color to black and white polaroids of my mother.”
Bono’s sketches include depictions of U2 songs, published in his 2022 memoir “Surrender,” as well as drawings of his musical influences that the Atlantic published as part of its Bono profile. But they also include his take on the Atlantic’s cover art for Ed Yong’s piece about animal cognition, which featured a striking image of an owl. (Bono is a subscriber.) Goldberg was flattered, impressed and slightly amused.
“This is a delightful and odd thing,” Goldberg thought at the time, “to have one of the world’s biggest rock stars spending time on his iPad redesigning your covers.”
Bono confirms that he has “drawn and painted over The Atlantic covers before … defaced is another word for this, but it’s with great affection. I’m a fan of their long form journalism.”
Goldberg asked him: Why not make a real one? So he did.
U2 has stayed together since 1976. It hasn’t always been easy.
As a freelance artist, he didn’t get rock star treatment. He went back and forth with the magazine’s art director, Oliver Munday, on 15 to 20 different iterations of the image — which is typical — and it started as a simple line drawing of Zelesnky.
News magazine covers do more than just convey the tone of a piece. They once served as the primary way to entice customers to actually buy a copy from a real-life newsstand. In the digital era, covers go viral for how urgently and creatively they respond to a news moment.
For Goldberg, Bono’s cover not only conveys the message of the piece (which Goldberg co-wrote with Anne Applebaum) “and is aesthetically pleasing,” it helps put a spotlight on a complex global issue that may be receding from the front page of daily newspapers.
“It was not difficult to get attention for the Ukraine story in the opening days of the conflict, because it was so shocking,” Goldberg said. “But like anything else, readers become accustomed to stories the longer they go on. And as an editor of anything, you want to draw maximum attention to the stories your people are making.”
“So yeah,” he said, “getting Bono to sketch a portrait of Zelesnky is not rocket science.”
Bono may be known just as much for his involvement in global affairs as he is known for music; he’s a regular on the world-leader circuit, pushing causes related to AIDS and climate change. Goldberg said they’ve talked at length about Zelensky and the fate of Ukraine. Bono has an affinity for Zelensky; he traveled with U2 bandmate the Edge to perform in a Kyiv subway last year, at Zelensky’s invitation.
“We have burdened [Zelensky] with impossible expectations — and impossibly, he has not let us down,” Bono wrote in his email. “I suppose that’s because President Zelenskyy is not now one person, he’s the Ukrainian people. How do you draw that? Well, you can’t. So I tried to make an icon of his visage instead. A few squiggles and I just got out of the way.”
But the Atlantic’s editors were impressed with Bono’s signature style and dedication to the endeavor. Political posters and protest art inspired the idea for the image, Munday wrote via email. “We decided that this Atlantic cover should, to a degree, feel drawn from this tradition. It should almost appear un-magaziney in that sense.”
“Bono sketched quickly and prolifically,” Munday wrote, and they gravitated toward versions that presented a “simplified Zelensky, rendered almost like a stencil cutout.”
Other versions were black-and-white and blue-and-white before they landed on the yellow and blue, evoking the Ukrainian flag.
The cover is bright yellow, and Zelesnky is outlined in Ukrainian blue. Bono suggested the colors be brighter. The quote, “The choice is between freedom and fear,” is written in Bono’s penmanship.
Yes, the magazine did pay Bono its usual fee for cover illustrations. But should we expect more new up-and-coming freelance artists to illustrate future Atlantic covers?
Goldberg jokes: “Our next cover will be drawn by Beyoncé, on the earned-income tax credit.”
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