Then, of course, there was the famous Warhol cover.  "I said, ‘Andy, I'm gonna have you drowning in a giant can of Campbell's soup.' And he went, ‘Oh, I love it! But wait a minute, George, aren't you going to have to build a very big can?' I said, ‘Andy, schmuck, I take a photograph of a can, a photo of you, and I put it together." After it came out, Warhol offered Lois six Brillo boxes in exchange for the original art. "I said Andy, schmuck, I can go to the A&P and get real Brillo boxes." Shortly before he died, Warhol upped his offer to a soup-can painting, but Lois held out. "I said, ‘Andy, I'm tempted, but someday that art ‘s gonna be hanging in the Museum of Modern Art."

Lois got Ed Sullivan to pose in a Beatles wig by going over to CBS and waiting in a crowd full of autograph-seeking fans. He had the leader of the My Lai massacre not only pose with Vietnamese children, but smile while doing so.

"I took him aside and I jerked him off. I'm a Korean veteran. And I told him I was in combat and [that] some of us had killed civilians. I lied to him. I never killed civilians in my life. But he felt that I was very sympathetic. So he's posing with these kids, and I said, ‘Hey, Rusty'—they called him Rusty—‘now give me a couple of big smiles!' Click. ‘Another one!' Click. That's the cover."

"My images aren't simplistic, but simple. And in order to be that simple and that concise and that powerful, it ain't that easy," Lois continued. That credo applies to his covers as much as his advertising work, including his famous "I Want My MTV" refrain from the 80's. And Lois says he still finds himself telling it to acolytes like Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter every day. "I tell him, why do you do such mundane crap? They bust their ass, they get the flavor of the month, they get Annie Leibovitz to shoot it, it's professionally done, they throw 30 blurbs on it, and it looks like the same old shit," Lois shrugged.  "The guy who understood about ideas was Andy. The images are simple! I'm watching decades of people doing complicated ideas.  And they're all saying I influenced them, but I don't see it."