Let’s Now All Speculate Wildly About The Meaning Of The ‘Mad Men’ Season Six Poster AMC Just Released

What’s with two Don Drapers passing each other on the street?

And who’s hand is Don holding? It looks Megan-y but we can’t tell for sure.

Oh, and what’s with the cops? Is someone in trouble?

Will Pete Campbell finally die the fiery death he’s been begging for when the plane taking off in the distance crashes down to the earth?

Is that Roger back there with Peggy on his arm?

OMG WE NEED ANSWERS TO THESE BURNING QUESTIONS!

BTW, the poster is the work of Brian Sanders, a veteran ad illustrator who worked on Madison Avenue during the Mad Men era.

But as the show prepared for its new season, which begins April 7, its creator, Matthew Weiner, inspired by a childhood memory of lush, painterly illustrations on T.W.A. flight menus, decided to turn back the promotional clock. He pored over commercial illustration books from the 1960s and ’70s and sent images to the show’s marketing team, which couldn’t quite recreate the look he was after.

“Finally,” he said, “they just looked up the person who had done all these drawings that I really loved, and they said: ‘Hey, we’ve got the guy who did them. And he’s still working. His name is Brian Sanders.’ ”

Which explains how a 75-year-old illustrator living outside of Cambridge, England — highly regarded in his own country but little known in the United States — came to create the image that beginning this week will be emblazoned on buses, billboards, magazine pages, Web sites and TV. The ad, depicting Don Draper, the show’s lead character, in a vertiginous pose on a New York City street corner that seems to be collapsing on him like the decade he is living in, looks as if it has time-traveled from the pages of an old copy of Reader’s Digest.

“What it did was take me right back, about 50 years,” said Mr. Sanders, who added that he was familiar enough with “Mad Men” to be in a bit of disbelief when the show came calling for his drawing board and brushes. The impressionistic image he created uses a scumbled acrylic technique that in its jazzy, textured effects instantly conjures 1960s illustration.

April 7th can’t get here soon enough.

(Vulture via Caitlin Kelly)