Look, I’m still a young’n, but even I can remember the last vestiges of the silver age comic book covers. I was rummaging through the basement last week and found a (relatively) old Superman book that had, on its cover, Clark Kent in a flaming phone booth, opening his shirt, an aghast look on his face. The caption read “Caught in the Act.”
Ooooh, I wanted to read that book. Superman’s identity exposed? Let’s see him get out of that one!
Yeah, the story inside sucked, but if I were a kid, I’d be after that book.
Today’s books, as far as I can see, don’t pull that off anymore. Maybe we’ve been spoiled by Previews and Newsarama.com and just don’t need a cover to hook us anymore. But personally, I’m tired of buying Ultimate Spider-Man and seeing nothing but another digitally enhanced Mark Bagley pose on the cover. I’m just not impressed.
Thoughts anyone? Are there any good comic book covers left out there?
Well I agree with you, there are exceptions, but for the most part I don’t trust covers anymore. I mean I still think they’re cool but now covers are usually drawn by a different artist than the artists that do the sequentials, this is mainly a problem with mainstream titles like Marvel, and DC, so even if I see a cool cover, it’s not likely it’s like that inside.
I never buy a comic book based on it’s cover.
Oh and I want to add, Mark Bagley’s Ultimate Spiderman covers just suck, I mean it’s always the same thing, Spiderman on some building or whatever, but I think these are exceptions since most covers are pretty nice now, what with digital coloring etc.
I usually don’t by based on the cover, but I do sometimes, and I was caught by this once. Adam Warren did the cover of an issue of Gen 13, so I bought the book, thinking he was doing another run on it (I loved Magical Girl Pretty Roxy and Grunge the Movie). He neither wrote nor drew it, and whoever was doing the writing and art in it was not as good as Warren or whoever was doing it for the period after MGPR that I read.
I know! I hate those things! They’re either issue nonspecific or so incredibly vague that they could be the cover to any issue of Spider-Man. And I hate the digital coloring they use on them. And they’re printed on shitty paper. And those colored bars on the sides are just silly. Gah! I’ve been wanting to get that out for a while.
The only thing that even comes that close to annoying me is J. Scott Campbell doing an alternate cover for every comic book ever. I hate his art now, and every time a new series comes out he does an alternate cover for it. Always.
The last comic I bought solely for its cover was a recent ish of The Incredible Hulk that was made up to look like the cover to Where the Wild Things Are. I don’t read Hulk now, and I didn’t even look through that issue, but that cover was just too cool.
On the whole though, I do think it’s kind of annoying that covers are mostly just pinups now and have absolutely nothing to do with what’s going on in the story for the most part. If the covers are good, yay (I love the covers to the latest Hawkman series) but it gets awfully boring in a lot of cases (every Dreamwave Transformers cover save TF/GI Joe looks exactly the same). The most that any cover is usually able to tell me is that it, at some point, features the title character.
I like that Jim Lee’s Batman covers have actually given you an idea of what’s happening in the issue. Superman Vs. Batman?! Cool. Batman strangling the Joker? Cool. Skeleton-Robin? Cool. Of course, Brian Bolland’s recent Gotham Knights covers are fantastic but I don’t expect anything less from him. I’m also enjoying the Formerly Known as the Justice League covers, but then I’m enjoying absolutely everything about that book.
While I’m on my rant, I hate the covers for Fantastic Four right now. The art is okay, but I despise that logo. It makes the whole thing just look icky to me. And I’m sick of the Buffy photo covers using like the same 3 pictures over and over again, though I know they don’t have that much of a choice. Phew.
