Easter Puck / Gordon Ross

Gordon Ross's cover for Puck's Easter issue places a grinning red devil—horned, sharp-featured, rendered in flat Art Nouveau planes—crouching among a profusion of white Easter lilies. The contrast is the entire joke: the Christian resurrection flower, symbol of purity and new life, shelters something ancient and sinister. No caption is needed. The argument is theological-comic: evil does not vanish at Easter; it hides inside the holiday's own ornament, leering at the viewer. Ross borrows the decorative vocabulary of Mucha-era poster art—bold outlines, stylized blooms, pastel ground—then contaminates it with the devil's scarlet body. The effect is simultaneously pretty and unsettling, a quality Puck regularly exploited to give its humor an edge beyond the merely topical.