As longtime readers know, my two great loves in my creative career have been comics and crosswords, so when Flo proposed I do a crossword in this newspaper segment, I leapt at the opportunity.

Crosswords and war have a curious history together. When the New York Times finally caved to peer pressure and started publishing grids, World War II was given as the reason. A little harmless fun, it was felt, might leaven the sometimes grim news from the front and quell panic. And yet the very first clue in the first puzzle it published was for a “Famous one-eyed general,” WAVELL, who would have figured into war-related headlines of the time. One year later, in the United Kingdom, certain crossword clues were investigated for being conspicuously close to military code words. The explanation was more accident than espionage, but it showed how the times could infect even the seemingly neutral ground of word games.

These days, grids are more likely to reflect antiwar sentiment, thanks to a loosening of editorial oversight and the bookish subculture of crossword creators. But that doesn’t mean winds of conflict have stopped blowing, and there’s been an increasing struggle in recent years over whose pop culture is worthier to appear in a grid.

For this Gastonian grid, I used a “word square,” a forerunner to the crossword whose answers are the same across and down. I was able to get four pretty topical words in there, with nods to the Cultists and the aren’t-they-cute racism from the last page… but I had to acknowledge that we’d never used “lede” before, using a long, rambling clue to make it gettable. Still, if I imagine that Bedard created this puzzle, the fact that the solver has to read some pro-military propaganda to finish filling it in is probably more of a feature than a bug. The overall message is probably clear: Bedard and the public now consider the Cult a joke, almost as harmless as those flower-kissing wood elves, whereas the Savage threat is far more urgent. Sign up to fight the latter, if you want your existence to have any meaning!


CULT
USER
LEDE
TREE