To answer some of the questions subscribers all over the world have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

You never can tell about Artzybasheff.

TIME'S editors were just as surprised as you must have been when they took a second look at the stern of the sinking Jap warship on this week's cover.

Most of our cover backgrounds are completely thought through in advance in conferences between the artist and TIME'S editors. But Artzybasheffs startling imagination works best when he is bent over his drawing-board all alone--and the rough sketch he brings in for a final okay is often worlds away from anything TIME'S editor thought of at the start.

Sometimes the newsmaker Artzybasheff is asked to paint lends himself to fairly conventional treatment, but even then "Artzy" is likely to surprise us. (When we put "Hangman" Heydrich on our cover, for example, we planned just one noose in the background, but Artzybasheff had so much fun tying knots on paper that he kept right on until there were ropes enough for 22 executions.)

But often as not he works into his painting some dramatic animal-like machine like the one this week. They are almost his trademark today; perhaps you remember the flying freight-cars behind Air Transport's General George--the sea serpent submarines around Nazi Admiral Doenitz--or the pistol-pointing battleship behind smirking Admiral Nagano of the Japanese Navy.

At first glance, you'd never think of Artzybasheff as an artist--much less an artist of such imaginative unpredictability. And I'm sure you'd never guess that his life has been so exciting and so colorful.

His accent is more Boston than any thing else (he was born in Kharkov, Russia, in 1899, the son of a successful novelist and playwright--grew tip in St. Petersburg--finished school there just before the revolution). He is low-voiced, restrained--and he wears rimless pinch-nose glasses (he served for five months as a machine gunner in the Ukrainian Army, then signed as seaman on a munitions ship bound for America--reached New York unable to speak English and with only 14-c- in Turkish money in his pocket. For months he worked as an engraver's assistant at $13 a week--lost his job when he asked for a $3 raise--made enough money to establish himself as an artist by shipping for five months on a Standard Oil tanker to South America). In brief, you would say he looks for all the world like a cautious banker (he has designed women's clothes, a Russian restaurant, stage sets, a night club--illustrated more than 50 books, written and illustrated two children's books of his own).

Artzybasheff did his first work for TIME in 1934, when he illustrated a letter we call Scheherazade ("More wonderful than the Arabian Nights are the true stories brought to you each week in the pages of TIME"--see cut).

Three years ago, when we started putting paintings instead of photographs on our covers, Artzybasheff was one of the first artists TIME'S editors asked to try his hand at it. We have now published 33 of his men-of-the-week (nine of them fellow Russians)--and we have five other Artzy basheffs in our "cover bank," each ready to print the moment the personality it so unpredictably portrays takes his place in the spotlight of the news.

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