Monday, May 23, 2016

"Entertainment Weekly" RIP covers

Between the 1989 launch of Entertainment Weekly and its 2019 switch to a monthly, the magazine ran only 19 "in memoriam" covers. Stats: 

  • 15 men, 4 women
  • 9 singers, 7 actors, 3 comedians
  • 15 white people, 4 Black
  • 11 black and white images, 8 color
  • year with most covers (four): 2016

The covers:

 Kurt Cobain, 1994

 Chris Farley, 1997

Frank Sinatra, 1998

George Harrison, 2001

Katharine Hepburn, 2003

Marlon Brando, 2004

Johnny Carson, 2005

Heath Ledger, 2008

Paul Newman, 2008

Michael Jackson, 2009 **

Patrick Swayze, 2009

Whitney Houston, 2012

Philip Seymour Hoffman, 2014

Robin Williams, 2014

David Bowie, 2016

Prince, 2016

George Michael, 2016

  Carrie Fisher, 2016

Aretha Franklin, 2018

** EW produced four covers for Michael Jackson's death; the other three:




I did not count covers about deceased notables that were not tributes published the week after their deaths:


Standalone tribute magazines (surely an incomplete list as these are harder to track):

Jerry Garcia 1995

Leonard Nimoy, 2015

Stan Lee 2018

Luke Perry 2019

Chadwick Boseman 2020

Am I missing any?


2/9/22 addendum: It was announced today that Entertainment Weekly is ceasing print publication; the last issue will be April 2022. I have been a subscriber since its second year, 1990. Looks like I have to add the magazine itself to this RIP post...

2 comments:

ronbo said...

Where is Brandon Lee?

Marc Tyler Nobleman said...

Good memory, ronbo, thanks. Lee's posthumous cover ran around a year after his death, so not in the same category as these, which were run the week after, usually with birth-death years; see note with the Princess Diana cover above.