Ken Lewis in Black and White

I don’t know how Ken Lewis the man is holding up under the pressure, but I can tell you his Wall Street Journal stipple portrait is not faring well. Shades of happy/sad dot-drawings of Vikram Pandit and Hank Paulson last summer. This credit crisis is brutal, even on cartoons.

Here was the Lewis dot-portrait that accompanied a January 16 story headlined “Lewis Defends Merrill Purchase”
:

All good. But by the next day, the pressure was evidently taking its toll as the embattled Bank of America chief “went on offense”:

Whoa, stipple Ken. Your dots are bunched way too tight. Relax those lines, man. Add some naphtha to the mix. Or have you considered acupuncture? At a minimum, the Audit recommends some stipple shiatsu and a long walk on a pen-and-ink beach landscape.

Dean Starkman Dean Starkman runs The Audit, CJR’s business section, and is the author of The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia University Press, January 2014). Follow Dean on Twitter: @deanstarkman.