If you squint to the right, you will see the most unflattering stipple ever published in the Wall Street Journal. I apologize that it's only 80 pixels wide: that's as large as it exists on the Wall Street Journal's site, and keep in mind that rendering a head so stuffed full of fetid flesh to scale would require several of Times Square's electronic billboards strung together.
With pre-emptive apologies to New Jersey Superior Court Judge Carol Higbee, there are only three possible explanations for a stipple this unflattering:
This actually is a flattering picture of Judge Higbee, in which case we are forced to imagine that, at the very least, she makes her judicial pronouncements entirely in farting noises.
The hedcut artist exaggerated Judge Higbee's worst features with the malevolent glee of a master caricaturist in the creation of her portait. Chuckling to himself, he ballooned her throat after the fashion a mating bullfrog's. He realized her dour lips as the pursed coils of overstuffed kielbasa. He delighted in making her jowls an infinite cascade of flab tumbling over one another, like waves of flesh lapping the shores of her cheekbones. Maybe his aim was personal: a jilted ex-lover, perhaps. Or perhaps he was simply trying to see how far he could push the caricature into the morbidly grotesque before his bosses at the Wall Street Journal noticed. Either way, a stippler anarchist works in the Wall Street Journal's art department.
Judge Higbee is secretly Jabba the Hutt, an interpretation not lost upon the WSJ's readers. "It's the Sarlacc Pit for all of you!" comments M.D. Fatwa on her latest article.
Poor Judge Higbee You know, WSJ, no one cares what a judge looks like this much.
Thanks to Mark for the link!
