It’s a homage to the movie poster for The Exorcist, but regardless, this JUSTICE LEAGUE AMERICA cover by Kevin Maguire pops. The greytone work is lovely, the red logo offsets it perfectly–and they even went to a different typeface for the logo on this issue, so that it wouldn’t detract from the mood of the … Continue reading Great Covers – JUSTICE LEAGUE AMERICA #27
This MISTER MIRACLE cover by Jack Kirby really shouldn’t work, and yet somehow it does. Especially at the start, Kirby’s assorted Fourth World covers received some horrific coloring, as though the DC production staff couldn’t figure out quite what to do with them. (They typically emphasized the wrong elements.) but here, the coloring works nicely. … Continue reading Great Covers – MISTER MIRACLE #2
If you can put aside the flagrant racism sprawled all over this Alex Schomburg CAPTAIN AMERICA cover, it’s another excellent example of the sort of piece that he routinely generated during the golden age of comics. The sheer number of actions and details is staggering, in that none of them repeat. Cap both machine guns … Continue reading Great Covers – CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS #38
A much emulated Jack Kirby cover, this THOR image is the earliest example I can find of one hero holding the dead body of somebody else (though the pose comes out of classical sculpture and painting.) The deep purple background sets a somber mood, but the white glow around the figures silhouettes them perfectly and … Continue reading Great Covers – THOR #127
From the days when Nick Cardy was DC’s house cover artist, doing most of the covers in a given month. This FLASH cover was pretty clearly laid out by editorial director Carmine Infantino, which is something he did for a lot of Cardy’s covers. That cloudy ghost figure is so clearly Infantino-based. The strong diagonal … Continue reading Great Covers – FLASH #224
Well, it’s hard to top this one, isn’t it? But even putting aside its historical significance, this Joe Shuster cover to ACTION COMICS #1 is excellent. First off, it’s got a great logo, and that classic DC banner area at the top, which always screams 1930s design. Then within the image area itself, the focus … Continue reading Great Covers – ACTION COMICS #1
For whatever reason, comic book publishers in the 1970s seem to have favored cluttered covers, packed to the gills with blurbs and copy, often to the detriment of the artwork, which was forced into a tiny space. This AMAZING ADVENTURES cover by P. Craig Russell suffers from this, yet the drawing is so delicate and … Continue reading Great Covers – AMAZING ADVENTURES #39
Despite the visual clutter of that list of titles down the left side, here’s the great Joe Kubert telling an entire story in one dramatic image on this cover for SUPER DC-GIANT #S-14. That mirror lets us see both combatants, as well as the confederates of the bad guy who are about to massacre the … Continue reading Great Covers – SUPER DC GIANT #S-14
A positively spooky HOUSE OF SECRETS cover by Bernie Wrightson, whose use of light and deep shadow would become a trademark. There really isn’t much to this image, but it’s nevertheless creepy–it looks like the image of a skull within the wafting smoke is almost covered up by the logo, which doesn’t help. Good, simple … Continue reading Great Covers – HOUSE OF SECRETS #103
Another Jack Kirby piece, this KAMANDI cover really shouldn’t work at all–and yet it does. The tiny figure of the hero with his back towards the camera, lots of dead space and only sparse wreckage to give it all a sense of place. But the two bits of Kirby cover copy cement the whole piece … Continue reading Great Covers – KAMANDI #20
The Tom Brevoort Experience 