I wasn't fond of the Panel discussion for many reasons. One of my primary concerns was that there was no opposing point of view. Even if it is a topic that I agree with, if there is a discussion, there should be more than one point of view. I felt like it was just a gathering of people congratulating each other for sharing the same viewpoint as themselves. It was so bad that even the producer of "The Wire" David Simon pointed out how one sided it was. The panel was so biased, ill represented, and pseudo-factual that I was incapable of representing it in any other way than with a snarky and satirical voice.
Jeremy Prince
General rule of thumb: if you're going to include comic strip tropes in an editorial illustration (speech bubbles, titles, etc), it needs to be justified and enhance the concept of the illustration itself, otherwise it functions as a crutch to distract from a weak concept. This is the situation you're in now. The idea of portraying the "circle jerk" nature of this panel is a solid one; I don't even think it can be contested. The portrayed backslapping is iconic enough as an action to stand alone in communicating the overly-convivial nature of the panel, but the text is making this illustration weaker both aesthetically and conceptually. Remove the speech bubbles, make that podium smaller (or make it go away), and find a way to arrange these figures in a more dynamic way that maintains the circle jerk concept without becoming cliché.
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