Cover Wars: Whose Artfag Kung-Fu Is Stronger?

Last week CP struck a decisive blow against the tyranny of PW’s seemingly unbreakable Cover Wars winning streak. But this week the Empire has struck back. Hard. So jump down, turn around and pick a bail of cotton, City Paper, because PW is the master now. What’s that you say? ‘Only a master of evil, Darth’? Perhaps, Rabbit. Perhaps. Still, all this is good news for people who STILL read alt-weeklies. Hands down the most singularly disturbing alt-weekly cover of the year, PW’s music issue rocks the dumbly-named Man, Man on the cover, dubbing them Band Of The Year and giving us an unsolicited glimpse of how dentists see the world: a Diane Arbus-ian funhouse of slack-jawed mongoloidal beardos with obscenely gaping cake-holes. Hats off to music editor Brian McManus for piecing together PW’s best music issue in, like, ever. And it does our heart good to see that hirsute, bath-averse young men are still wowing the kids with trout mask replicas of Beefheartian sea chanteys. Kudos, too, for the art direction. Loved the Devo and Mothers of Invention homages. CP has a good thing going with its annual What Happened Next follow-ups on the year’s cover stories, but thumbnail covers handsomely arranged Scrabble-like against a black backdrop just don’t compare with the Ewwww-inducing power of PW’s freakozoic dental porn. The horror, the horror.
Winner: PW