Comic Book Cover to Cover for 03/26/08

No, I didn't scrap the Cover to Cover feature. If I had to use an excuse, I'm lazy and forgot about the new feature, especially when I was sick all last weekend and missed it there as well. Last week was a pretty dull week in terms of the covers books shipped with. We had the controversial New Avengers cover where David Mack traced referenced an old magazine and it had to be changed at the last minute, but other than that, I couldn't find a single cover that really caught my eye or was otherwise noteworthy. To see what covers I did manage to string a few words together about or to let me know what your favourite cover was or just general thoughts or comments, hit the jump.

Cover of the Week - Blue Beetle #25 Cover by Rafael Albuquerque

To start, this was a rather weak week for comic book covers. I mostly only looked at the ones I bought, but I couldn't find any in the solicits that caught my eye either. That said, this Blue Beetle cover, while on first glance not overly special, really grabs me for some reason. It helps I know what's going on in the book already and seeing the JLI members coming to back up Blue Beetle against the Reach is definitely something I want to see.

I'm open to suggestions from anyone for an alternate Cover of the Week, but of all the covers I surveyed, this was the only one that managed to pull me in or make me feel any positive kind of emotion one way or another about the book.

Teen Titans #57 Cover by Eddy Barrows

This cover has all the makings of a good cover. Good composition. The 'turning to face the reader' pose is always a surefire way to draw someone in. However, a basic anatomy course would have helped this image immensely. For starters, look at Rose's waist. Even if you account for the warped perspective, from profile view, it's still thinner than her bicep. Her back leg looks like it's attached by some peg and is a separate piece of the body. And then there's her right thigh and knee / calf. It looks like some freaky alien with inverted leg joints, like how a dog's legs bend.

The whole image looks like it was drawn from the top down without any rough drafts or proportion layouts, as it starts out fine and slowly gets worse and worse the further down you go. This cover gets the best looking worst cover award.

Countdown to Final Crisis #5 Cover by Scott Kolins & Kamandi #1 Cover by Jack Kirby

The homage is the only noteworthy thing about this cover. Personally, I would have went with Karate Kid's dead body or Buddy Blank and his grandson in a raft in the water where Kamandi's boat would have been in the same image instead of some weird Karate Kid bathed in blood perspective they ended up going with. Kind of hard to screw up an homage, though, and as far as this cover goes, it's not great, but gets the job done.

Daredevil #106 Cover by Marko Djurdjevic

I'm really getting bored of Djurdjevic's covers lately. Taken on their own or in small doses, they are beautiful and some are down right amazing looking. However, it seems like the monthly grind is wearing on him as they've been getting progressively worse as time goes on. Well, 'worse' isn't the best way to describe. This is still well drawn and technically sound artwork. But for a comic cover, which is supposed to be dynamic and serve as the first glimpse into a book, it should be something that draws my attention and makes me want to pick this book up. I see this and there's nothing. I don't hate it, but there's no emotion here and if I had never read this book before, I wouldn't really be inclined to even pick this up to look at it.

Green Lantern #29 Cover by Ivan Reis

Not sure who's idea it was for the pastel colours on this cover, but they really clash with the random photoshop effects, such as the differeing styles and colours of the lantern and GL symbols on the right with the wispy, tealish coloured ring effect. It's like two different colourists were given half the page to do and they just pasted them together in the end. Even the the green eye glow effect looks different in colour and style.

These all combined with the pastels make the otherwise great pencils for this supposedly retro "secret origin" tale's cover look terrible to me. Personally, I would have went with a homage to Emerald Dawn or one of the other Year One or origin stories' covers or used an old school colour pallet, similar to the way Mighty Avengers handled the Doom, Iron Man and Sentry trip to the past with the Kirby dots and newstand fading and limited colour pallets.

Flaunt Magazine 2005 and blatant David Mack "referencing" for scrapped New Avengers #39.

You may remember the bitchfest when previews for New Avengers #39 came to light and everyone and their mother pointed out the obvious "similarities" between the above two photos. The updated cover image can be seen below if you want to see how much it changed from the above one.

New Avengers #39 Cover by David Mack

Well, the other cover didn't even look like Echo and that was weird, considering Mack helped design and create the character. I wasn't surprised when it turned out to be a random copy and paste effort. The replacement image is a much better version, but I hate the fact they kept that retarded Wolverine outline in the background. It adds nothing to the cover and is only there to cash in on the Wolverine effect, where him being on the cover gets more people to buy the book. I just want to take a black marker rub him out of it everytime I pick up this issue.

Otherwise, a great second effort by Mack. Oh wait, I guess this would be the first effort all things considered?

Related Posts

Comic Book Cover to Cover

• Comic Book Cover to Cover for 03/26/08
• Comic Book Cover to Cover for 03/12/08
• Comic Book Cover to Cover for 03/05/08
• Comic Book Cover to Cover for 02/27/08