Some people have lawyers on retainer. Others have lawyers thrust upon them. Al Brandtner was in the latter category until the Secret Service visited “Axis of Evil,” an exhibit at Columbia College’s Glass Curtain Gallery, on Thursday, April 7. By the next day, when the Secret Service wanted to contact the artist who’d created the mock stamp portraying George W. Bush with a gun pointed at his head over the slogan “Patriot Act,” they couldn’t. Any questions they had would have to go through the attorney he’d hired that morning.
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The visit hit the news the following week. On Monday, Brandtner listened to messages from the Sun-Times and Fox News, but he didn’t call back. On Tuesday he walked downstairs to the basement studio that houses his business, Brandtner Design, switched on the TV, and sat down to finish an illustration for a new edition of The Secret Garden, which he had to have ready for a client by the end of the day. The phone rang. Brandtner let the answering machine record a woman who said she was from the BBC and asked him to please return her call as soon as possible. Then he heard his name again, from the television this time. Fox was running its story about the show. He turned it off and the phone rang again. It was Good Morning America. The calls kept coming throughout the day, from NPR, WLS, the Guardian. “It was everybody,” says Brandtner, “all these very urgent requests–you know, get back to us as quickly as possible.”
Brandtner’s first public exposure came at age seven, when his drawing of a dog was printed in the children’s section of the local newspaper. The next came when he was 17, after he won a contest in his home state of Virginia to design a new logo for a nuclear-powered cruiser, the USS Virginia. The logo was a traditional piece picturing a missile, the nuclear symbol, and a map of Virginia in a ship’s wheel, and Brandtner won a scholarship for it. He met both the governor and political cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, then at the Richmond News-Dispatch, who judged the contest. But a stir developed when the logo was published: Brandtner had left Virginia’s eastern shore, which is separated from the rest of the state by Chesapeake Bay, off the map. “I brought the scorn of this whole section of Virginia down on me and had to write a letter of apology in the paper,” he says.
