Magazines generally try to have covers that are attention grabbing (so that you’ll grab and buy the issue) and unique (so that they won’t be mistaken for another magazine). But sometimes magazines end up ion the newsstand with exactly the same cover (or at least close to the same cover) as another magazine. This might be because of some striking recent event that has only one image, or one iconic image. Or it might be chance. I notice that magazines try very hard to avoid this, but sometimes it can’t be helped.
The classic case was the month that three magazines – Scientific American, National Geographic, and Smithsonian – all had exactly the same image on the cover. This was January of 1980, and they all reproduced the riveting image of a volcano erupting on Io.
There have been other cases. In 1981 both Cinefantastique and American Cinematographer had their entire covers filled with a blowup from the poster for the new Ray Harryhausen movie Clash of the Titans (his last feature-length film, it would turn out)
I can think of one other case where the image was similar. Playboy’s relatively short-lived (at least while they were still publishing it) sister magazine Oui had a cover that showed a naked woman’s torso over which she was pulling a triangular cloth. It looked an awful lot like the cover of Psychology Today that showed a clothed woman’s torso with a very deep triangular opening down the center – sort of a clothing-negative version of the Oui cover.
Mad magazine has frequently showed other magazines “copying” their own cover motifs (like the issue where the entire cover was basically a giant bar code symbol, or when the cover shows Alfred skating down the cover, and one half of the cover drawn as if peeling away from the slash. I think very similar covers both ran in the New Yorker.), but these haven’t been at the same time.
On October 27, 1975, some singer from New Jersey named Bruce Springfield or something like that appeared on the covers of both Time and Newsweek magazines.
Great! Although you get bonus points if the images are almost identical.
(No points for cover stories of major news events at the same time – that’s expected. But things that aren’t immediate Big News showing up on the cover simultaneously gets a botice.)
I remember when (IIRC) Time and Newsweek both had OJ Simpson’s mug shot on the cover after he was arrested for his wife’s murder. There was some controversy at the time because Time’s photo was considerably darker than Newsweek’s.
Not surprising that they had the same cover – it was his mug shot. But the editor at Time tried to make the mood darker by making the tone darker, without thinking of the racial implications. It didn’t help that, as the link says, the magazines would usually be side-by-side on the newsstands, highlighting the difference.
Here’s a case with the same blurb article on two magazines, but they’re two years apart. Even the subsidiary titles are the same. Looks like someone copied.
Here’s the Mad magazine cover with Alfred skating a cut through the cover (March 1990). They said that another magazine (New Yorker, I think) copied the idea for the cover later on. I haven’t been able to find it.
