Who is that behind advertising executive Don Draper (played on screen by Jon Hamm)? Is it... Don Draper? Could his stolen identity be about to catch up with him, finally? Whose hand is Don holding? Is he running from the police, or ignoring those One Way/Stop signs? Why is a jet airliner visible? What's in the briefcase?
All these questions are raised by the poster, which was conceived by Weiner when he recalled the lavish illustrations he saw on TWA flight menus as a child. The AMC marketing team, however, were unable to ape the style to Weiner's satisfaction.
"Finally," Weiner told the New York Times, "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.'"
The 75-year-old Sanders was indeed still working – but not in the States. He's British and lives near Saffron Walden in Essex. For the Mad Men poster, he used an acrylic technique of the kind he would have employed 50 years ago.
"It’s a style we refer to over here in England as bubble and streak," Sanders told the New York Times. "I don’t work in that manner now, and I was surprised how quickly it came back, the ability to use it in that particular way."
Mad Men returns to AMC in the US on 7 April, and to Sky Atlantic in the UK on 10 April.