'New Yorker' Cover Accurately Captures The Subway's 'Summer Of Hell'

The "Summer Of Hell" for NYC mass transit commuters has reached the cover of the latest New Yorker this week: above, you can see Bob Staake's incredibly realistic depiction of an everyday ride on the "hell train."

Not that Staake was necessarily drawing from his own life for this one: "The commute between my house and studio on Cape Cod is forty-five feet, so what do I know about subway rage?” Staake said of the cover. "O.K., maybe I don’t have to ride the subway every day, but my kids, who live in Brooklyn and Queens, do,” he explained. Still, hearing your kids talk about about it isn't the same as the first-hand personal experience of being wedged into an overstuffed train with broken air conditioning, a subway waterfall, a peacock, a manspreader, and a New Zealand songstress.

Staake at least has a New Yorkers' sense of humor about the whole mishmosh, however: “For me, the only thing worse than descending into a New York City subway in July is descending into a New York City subway in August."

But wait, there's more New Yorker subway content: you can check out Luci Gutiérrez's sketches on subway substitutes for summertime (dog-led rollerblading does seem like fun), and also this appropriately upside-down cartoon: