It turned out very well, I think, and serves as a perfect counterpoint to the first.
Of course, those of you who were enticed by the “mysterious” aspect of it all will, no doubt, be very disappointed by the actual post that the two visuals were created to support, and you may want to just take note that the post is about comic book covers and just skip ahead to look at the pictures.
For those of you who didn’t skip ahead, I’ve noticed that comic book covers have changed a lot since I was a kid.
If you’re into comics at all, covers are very important, as, all too often, comics actually are judged by their covers, so as a fan there are certain elements that you’ll look for, and as a publish you really need to be aware of what the fans are looking for.
(It’s worth noting here that it’s an established – albeit bizarre – fact in the comic book industry that a comic book, any comic book, that features a gorilla on the cover will experience increased sales for that month.)
In any case, when I was a kid, you could look at a cover and have an idea of what was going to happen inside, as the cover usually depicted a scene that was at least representative of some element of the story.
(As another aside, during his tenure at DC Comics, the late, great Julius Schwartz would often have an artist come up with a cover image for a book and then task the writer to come up with a story built around that cover image. Shortly after his death, as a tribute, several writers and artists put out new stories based on some classic “Julie” covers.)
Covers often featured some expository text that would help to entice you further, often incorporating the book’s title, providing you with something like this:
(Note that while it lacks a gorilla, this cover does feature a weeping character, which, oddly enough, has also been observed to increase a book’s sales. And for the record, this cover is probably unnecessarily [as opposed to necessarily?] mean to Ashlee Simpson, but it’s just a joke, and I must admit that she has actually been looking pretty damn good lately, though the real point is that hotness is relative, pun intended, and compared to her relative, no matter how good she looks, she’ll never, ever achieve a Jessica level of hotness.)
John Byrne in particular loved to use the expository text/book logo device.
These days, though, you will never see a cover featuring expository text, particularly in the style above, and it’s increasingly unlikely that you’ll see a cover that has anything to do with the story inside at all.
If it’s a “team” book, the odds are it will just feature a random picture of one of the team members (if it’s an “X” book, said member will, more often than not, be Wolverine), or of the entire team.
Certainly it won’t give you an idea of what’s actually going on inside.
These are the sort of covers that were reserved for “special” books back in my day, like an anniversary issue or something.
Now they’re the norm.
Worse than that, though, are the totally misleading covers. These covers not only fail to give you an indication of what’s happening inside, they don’t even give you an idea of what the interior art is going to be like.
It used to be that the artist who did the interiors also did the cover art. Not so anymore. There is an increasing number of comic artists who make their living almost solely from drawing covers.
Many of them are extremely “hot,” and a cover done by one of them will, like a weeping gorilla (or the color purple; another odd sales booster) will bump up the sales dramatically.
Is that really a problem? Honestly, I love a great Alex Ross, Greg Horn, Adam Hughes, Greg Land, or Frank Cho as much as the next fanboy, and there’s no denying that a comic book cover like such as this one has a definite appeal:
But the problem comes once you flip the book open and find that rather than some beautifully painted Ross artwork inside you’re greeted by what looks to be the manic scribblings of a chimp armed with a crayon.
(During a particularly irritating part of its run, Marvel’s Elektra was the worst offender, featuring lavishly detailed Greg Horn covers with interior art that looked like it was pieced together from random doodles I’d done when I was five.)
Still, all things considered, this current trend is nowhere near as irritating as the foil/hologram/velvet “variant” cover craze of the early 90s, so I guess I can’t complain too much.
Even so, I do miss the days when you actually could judge a comic book by it’s cover.
The real point of this entry, though, was the creation of the visual aids. I hope you enjoyed seeing them as much as I enjoyed creating them.
I know that there are some “in-joke” elements that will leave you a little puzzled (The “XYZ+” on the second cover, for example, is meant to spoof Marvel’s incomprehensible rating system. WTF is PSR+ supposed to indicate?”), but I think they work pretty well to illustrate the differences between the covers of today and the covers of my distant youth.
I think both are suitable candidates for inclusion in the Heroic Portraits gallery, as I can imagine that there are people who might like to see themselves featured on a comic book cover.
Speaking of Heroic Portraits, I’ll need to devote most of tomorrow to actually putting up a site.
Somewhere along the line I’ll try to crank out a more traditional Threshold entry.
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