We talked earlier about the first BATMAN cover to feature an African-American character on it. This GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW cover is definitely the first DC book to feature a black man in a super hero costume. And while it would have been more plugged into the zeitgeist in, say, 1968 than when it saw print … Continue reading Great Covers – GREEN LANTERN #87
Another great and very simple Fred Ray patriotic WWII-era SUPERMAN cover. Images like this one were all the rage during the peak years of the Second World War, but Superman somehow did them larger and better than most.
Here is the realism and relevance of the GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW series taken to the extreme, with an image that DC might think twice about running even today. Neal Adams’ photo-realistic style is used to good effect as we are smacked in the face with the image of a super hero (albeit a sidekick) using … Continue reading Great Covers – GREEN LANTERN #85
Concept and copy-oriented, this Curt Swan SUPERMAN cover succeeds by teasing the events of the story inside. In a day when comics typically contained three separate stories, the promise of a longer tale “in three great parts” was like getting the promise of a movie. Clearly this had to be an important story to warrant … Continue reading Great Covers – SUPERMAN #132
Credited to the Simon & Kirby Studio, this BOY COMMANDOS cover might be the work of Jack Kirby, or it might not. Either way, it makes its impact through the juxtaposition of the immaculate attributes of Superman and the down-to-Earth dead-end kid values of Brooklyn. As always, the yellow background functions like a spotlight.
A perfectly designed George Perez WONDER WOMAN cover encapsulating the character’s amazonian background and heritage.
There’s some weird anatomy at play on tiger-Batman, but this Irv Novick BATMAN cover packs the sort of impact more typically reserved for DC’s mystery comics of the era. I don’t know what it means either, but I certainly want to crack it open and find out. The only misstep, I think, is in making … Continue reading Great Covers – BATMAN #209
And sometimes, you don’t have any good ideas for a cover at all. This Wayne Boring SUPERMAN cover is self-referential and meta, in an era when such ideas weren’t common. The strong yellow background makes the image vibrantly pop off the page.
I first saw this Joe Gallagher ALL-STAR COMICS cover featuring the Justice Society of America reproduced tiny and in black and white in the STERANKO HISTORY OF COMICS, and it made a great impact on me. It’s a simple, story-driven image, with the diagonal of Brain-Wave’s descending foot guiding the eye to the running forms … Continue reading Great Covers – ALL STAR COMICS #17
A great STRANGE ADVENTURES cover by Neal Adams, who at this point was making a real name for himself as an extraordinary cover artist. Adams tended to color-direct his own pieces, which meant that the coloring was worked into the design, as it is here. The red of Deadman pops beautifully against the subdued greens … Continue reading Great Covers – STRANGE ADVENTURES #207
