New York Times, Monday, October 12, 2015

When Will approached me with his "never been done" scheme, it seemed the perfect opportunity to do something I've long wanted to do — create a daily NYT puzzle with illustrated clues. (I created an illustrated Sunday puzzle in 2004.)

I latched onto a spoonerism angle to bring something a bit different to the mix, but I didn't want to regurgitate someone else's creation. So I started mulling phrases. At some point I turned to two-syllable words that might be spoonerizable, beginning randomly with bucket and ticket … then pocket. A theme ensued. Googling "rocket full of pie" afterward, I found only a few unique hits, one being a children's short story by Joan Aiken in 1955.

Will originally asked me for a Mon-Wed. When I ran the basics by him, he asked if it could be done up as a Monday. Since I'd set up the grid to allow a fair amount of flexibility, and Monday seemed like just the place for a puzzle with cartoons, I quickly said yes.

The central answer could have been done Schrödinger-like, so that the crossing answers would fit their clues no matter which phrase was entered. But Will felt that wouldn't be Monday-worthy, and I agree. Better to keep it simple. Plus, it would have made for more constrained fill (I know because I tried).

What a great start to this "breaking the mold" theme week! I'm a sucker for puzzles with visual elements, and I love Patrick's unique style of art, so this one worked very well for me. The theme — spoonerizing A POCKET FULL OF RYE into "a rocket full of pie" — is simple enough for a Monday and it made me laugh. Plus, Patrick's drawings are just nice to look at.

I liked how NURSERY RHYME and SPACE STATION apply to the two drawings, too — great to get some bonus theme material to flesh out the puzzle.

What with effectively five theme answers (including the big spaces for the two drawings), it's great that Patrick works in some colorful fill. There's not a lot of long stuff, just LIME TREE and STARGATE, but a dose of geography in BOGOTA, WARSAW, and LIBYA zest things up. Even the six-letter entries like EUREKA! and YES YOU serve their purpose well.

I personally dislike partials more than any other sort of glue (except random Roman numerals), so I didn't care for IF AT or AS BIG, but otherwise the puzzle is so smooth. Very well executed.

It stinks to be an Across Lite solver today (which I usually am). The puzzle makes absolutely no sense what with giant chunks of 3x3 black squares; no way to display those comic strip panels. Might have been better to just do away with the .puz file completely. Get into the 21st century already, crossword software!

Great idea to work cartoon panels into a crossword grid, something I can't remember seeing before. BTW, there's another puzzle this week that I also loved, so there'll be two POWs! this week.