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If there was any justice in this crazy mixed-up media world, there would be an annual award for Most Ubiquitous Freelance Illustrator.

The award would be in the shape of a bronze stack of magazines and would be called the Friedman, in honor of the perennially popular pointillist (and water color) drawings by Drew Friedman, which appear in everything from The New York Observer to The New Republic.

This year's Friedman would surely go to Pittsburgh-based illustrator John Ritter, whose color-tinted photo art runs almost every week in The New Yorker, New York, The New York Times, and especially, in The Atlantic, where he's wracked up three covers since 2003.

His stuff is good, but we're concerned that he might be burning himself out just a bit. We wouldn't want a run on Ritter illustrations to sour art directors on his work. After all, previous Friedman recipients include Daniel Adel, Roberto Parada, Istvan Banyai, and Robert Risko, all of whose work we came to rely on like old friends, only to see them less and less nowadays. The Friedman is a double-edged sword, to be sure, but it's an honor nonetheless.