We’ll see how this goes. The F.D.A. today released nine new warning labels for cigarettes, each of which includes a national quit-smoking hotline number and a graphic representation of one the ways that tobacco can make you ugly, gross, and dead.
When these labels were first proposed back in November, I talked to a few experts on scary images about how they thought they’d go over, especially among school-aged kids, who are part of the target audience:
Tim Jacobus, who illustrated the covers of the “Goosebumps” series for a decade, is an expert on freaking out twelve-year-olds, and he worries that these drawings might have the opposite effect. “The illustration style, there’s an appeal to that,” he told me. “Kids may be, like, ‘that’s kind of gruesome, but it’s cool, I’m going to hang on to this.’ ”
Gahan Wilson, who does his share of creepy illustrations, including for this magazine, says these drawings are “coddling” smokers. Wilson believes in the power of scary imagery (his rule of thumb: “if it scares you it’s going to scare them”), but, as a former smoker, thinks the F.D.A.’s warnings would be more effective as straight text. “The extreme thing” to do, he says, would be to write, in the style of a poison warning, “Caution: contents will cause cancer,” and leave off the drawings. “Words are much more to the point,” he says.
Well, the images won out, and will be coming to bodegas near you this fall—and perhaps being hoarded and traded by youngsters for their cool value soon after.
(via Newyorker)