(Not So) Great Covers: POWERS THAT BE #3

I don’t really want to make this a regular thing, since it’s always a lot easier to knock on something rather than being positive about it. But after last week’s QUASAR cover

I had a few people come back with comments of, “Oh yeah? Well, this cover is even worse!” And a few of them were. So here then is POWERS THAT BE #3, published by Broadway Comics. Broadway was former Editor in Chief Jim Shooter’s third attempt to start up a new company after he was ousted from Marvel. At Valiant, he wound up similarly on the outs thanks to what he says were some shady business practices, and I believe Defiant simply ran out of financing and had to close up shop. Broadway was a subsidiary of Broadway Video, the production company owned by Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, and they got into the comic book business for a few short years in the mid-1990s.

Shooter had some strange ideas for how to go about things at this new company, odd solutions to seeming problems. One such concern was in how to make the company’s offerings stand out on the crowded comic book racks of that time period. The answer was to give every cover a stark-white background, with the image fit into a black frame. Unfortunately, while this did make Broadway’s books stand out, it didn’t make them attractive to buyers, and this cover is a good example why. There’s a theory in comic book cover design called the “Dynamic Live Area”. What it is is an inverted L-shape that indicates the portions of the comic that are the most likely to be seen regardless of how it is racked. Breaking it down even further, it amounts the the leftmost inch of the cover, should the books be arranged fanned out on a rack, and the top third, if they’re in traditional drop-down racks that conceal most of the book behind the one in front of it. (Of course, many shops used full facing racks by this point, but not everyone had that luxury of space.)

This design almost aggressively avoids putting anything interesting in the Dynamic Live Area apart from the company’s oversized logo and some small type. The image on this particular cover is crowded into the lower right size. and with that stark white background, the guy who’s been punched doesn’t really pop against the bright magenta car he’s been hurled into. For that matter, the guy doing the punching is tiny and lacking in presence or impact. So much like the QUASAR cover, this is a piece where virtually every decision that was made about it was made poorly. There’s definitely a much more impactful version of this image that still adheres to most of what the firm was attempting to do, but this isn’t it.