This Carmine Infantino FLASH cover was editor Julie Schwartz’s favorite of all the covers he commissioned. And it’s a tough choice to argue, as this image is so direct and so simple that you could use it as the cover of virtually any Flash story. I’m not wild about the candy cane striping in the … Continue reading Great Covers – FLASH #163
A terrific concept cover–too bad the story that goes with it is so mediocre–by Kurt Schaffenberger for LOIS LANE #63 (with some revisions to the Clark/Superman figure by Wayne Boring, it looks like.) This one’s all about the promise of the story. But that yellow background is like a beacon, and Superman’s primary colors aren’t … Continue reading Great Covers – LOIS LANE #63
Nice PHANTOM STRANGER cover by Nick Cardy, likely over another Carmine Infantino sketch. A good concept, and fine composition–see how the converging gunfire draws your attention right to the figure in the center–and a nice use of color on this one.
The cover to BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS by Frank Miller is a classic, but for all the right reasons. Here, more than in any comic book cover produced before this point, strong design and typography lead the way. This image is designed to feel far more like a book cover than a comic book … Continue reading Great Covers: BATMAN: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS #1
This Ed Hannigan symbolic BATMAN cover is so ridiculous that it’s excellent! It feels very much in the style of Joe Kubert’s assorted war covers, but isn’t the kind of thing that was often seen on the super hero books. And the fact that Death is literally counting Batman out brings the whole thing to … Continue reading Great Covers – BATMAN #372
Another Jack Kirby cover, this one for his KAMANDI series from the early 1970s. This piece just screams for attention. The shark-as-monster who dominates the image to the inclusion of virtually everything else is powerful enough, but the fact that he speaks, and his line is at once so obtuse and yet also so provocative, … Continue reading Great Covers – KAMANDI #23
Variations on this WITCHING HOUR cover by Nick Cardy were common on the weird/mystery titles published by DC in the early 1970s. But on this one, the stark red face of the demon as well as the expression on the boy’s face and the white of his turtleneck really help to sell it. The red … Continue reading Great Covers – WITCHING HOUR #45
Carmine Infantino experimented a bit in the 1960s with covers that incorporated the series logo, in the manner of Will Eisner’s SPIRIT sections. This BATMAN cover was one of the first, if not the first. At the time, DC was beginning to lose sales traction to newcomer Marvel, and was looking for a way to … Continue reading Great Covers – BATMAN #194
I can’t swear to it with absolute certainty, but I suspect that this BATMAN cover by Neal Adams represents the first time that any person of color has been depicted on a Batman cover. And especially given the time period in which this cover saw print, late 1970, you’d expect that most readers would be … Continue reading Great Covers – BATMAN #230
This Murphy Anderson FLASH cover is another example of a technique that editor Julie Schwartz used on numerous occasions: a cover on which a character engaged the prospective reader directly. This iteration adds the additional wrinkle of the Flash’s fate being too gruesome to be outwardly depicted–who could resist cracking the cover to see what … Continue reading Great Covers – FLASH #193
The Tom Brevoort Experience 