“If it takes a cover for you to produce great art, stop
drawing comics.” – Ryan Ottley
Ryan was responding to a Tweet I made where I noted “a great
cover forces the interior to have to up the game to live up to what's promised
on the outside.” Or, in a less clumsy attempt to squeeze thoughts into 140
characters: The entire package needs to be strong, from the first impression made
by the cover to the last word in the final panel of the story.
Ryan had been commenting on the attitude that the cover was
the most important aspect of a comic since it is the first thing people see.
This is one of those great rules of comics going back to the Golden Age that
many people still cling to, despite the fact the game has changed.
In those early days of comics, the publishers were taking
their cues from the pulps. Lurid and exciting images that may, or may not, have
related to the stories inside. The lasting image of Action Comics #1 came from
a blow up of an interior panel, but other covers that followed were scenes that
related the theme of the book - “Action.” The same with “Detective,” “Adventure”
and the gags of “More Fun.” As Super-Heroes hit the scene, they took over the
covers, occasionally teasing a story inside, but often interacting with their
co-stars or striking an iconic pose. The key was that striking image that would
get the kids attention on the newsstand.
In the late-40s/early-50s,
the more representative covers became the norm. Sometimes even to the point of
the splash page being a near copy of the cover. I seem to recall cases where a
book (World’s Finest?) had a Curt Swan cover, a Wayne Boring or Dick Sprang
splash and then back into Swan for the story. One assumes the editor decided
Swan’s splash was more dynamic than the commissioned cover which was bumped to
the interior.
During this period, the cover artist wasn’t always on the
interior. But he would usually be among the stable of artists that would rotate
on the character. You accepted Al Plastino and Curt Swan interiors under a
Wayne Boring cover because the three artist had all been working on Superman,
Boring maybe getting the cover because he was the main artist on the newspaper
version. As far as you knew, Bob Kane was drawing all of the Batman material,
but sometimes he looked more like Shelly Moldoff or Swan or Jerry Robinson or…
Time marches into the Marvel Age where the skeleton crew of
long time pros like Kirby and Ditko were handling interiors and covers with
some editorial input and scripting by Stan Lee. As things expanded, Jack Kirby
covers would continue even after he left a book. By the early 70s when Kirby
jumped to DC, the Marvel covers still were somewhat uniform thanks to an “action
window” design and a number of them being drawn (or designed) by Gil Kane. At
DC, Kirby did his own covers but the war titles were more often than not led by
editor Joe Kubert’s covers and Neal Adams was showing up all over the Superman,
Batman and JLA related covers as his interior work slowed. As the decade
progressed your covers were often by Nick Cardy, Ernie Chan and Jose
Garcia-Lopez with interiors by others.
The shift to more interior artists doing their own covers
seemed to kick in when publishers started returning the art. Covers would bring
more money than a regular story page. You’d still see “name” covers on books
with “lesser” artists on the interiors, but it wasn’t as common and often was
due to use of inventory material, an artistic shake-up where the cover was
already done or new talent who might not be deemed ready for covers.
Today, it’s a strange time. Usually the interior artists are
doing covers, but publishers bring in other artists for “incentive” covers to
boost sales. You can do the comic equivalent to the Sistine Chapel for a cover,
but the current reality says it won’t help sales because the orders will be
based on a postage stamp sized version of the image in PREVIEWS. If you’re
lucky enough to make it out of “special order” to the actual sales rack, THEN
your cover can sell the book. But then what?
My attitude is that the cover has to serve the book. It sets
the tone. For 51 DELTA, Sarge did all of the art – interiors and cover. The
scene on the cover doesn’t happen in the book, but it tells you it is a
light-hearted Science Fiction adventure. For “IT” GIRL MURDERS, I’m bringing in
another artist for the trade cover to give it more of a pulp novel/Film Noir
poster look with the book’s artist Kurt Belcher and myself doing covers for the
individual chapters when they are put up on Comixology and other digital
sources that will be more focused on events in those chapters.
Not that I’d object to a Neal Adams cover…
