Portland Mercury and Maui Time Weekly Unite

Portland Mercury art director Justin “Scrappers” Morrison enjoys working for other alt-weeklies during his downtime.

After winning first place in the Cover Design category of the 2010 AltWeekly Awards, he reached out to second place winner Chris Skiles of Maui Time Weekly. Camaraderie ensued:

Chris and I started talking and sending each other the weekly papers we make.

He was getting married around the time I was going on vacation to Maui, so he asked if I wanted to fill in for him and do a cover while I was there. YES!!! I really wanted to see how their office worked anyways. And now I know it works great because of the people who work there, I swear every one of those people do the jobs of three normal employees.

The cover story was about the top ten unreported news stories of 2010 put out by Project Censored. So my challenge was to take these global stories and make them relevant to the island of Maui. The idea I came up with was that these pieces of news washed up on the beach.

The resulting cover, shown here, is reminiscent of Morrison’s winning pieces for the Mercury (shown here and here) and was culled from scrap wood found in Maui Time publisher Tommy Russo’s backyard.

The obvious conclusion here is that with a little scrap wood, and a Hawaiian vacation in Tommy Russo’s backyard, maybe all of AAN’s papers can finally get along.

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