Cover Me

“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…