NO COVER CHARGE

Since I posted those covers in honor of Spider-Man 3, I started thinking about some things. There are so many great comic book covers that are burned into my memory from my years of collecting. So many classic images and brilliant concepts that leaped off the rack and almost literally forced me to buy the issue. Not surprisingly, NONE of those covers were published in the recent past. So I've done some research and I've randomly chosen some covers to look at. I picked covers from The Amazing Spider-Man series since that was the first comic I bought and, let's face it, Spidey is just the best comic book character ever created. I also didn't choose covers from before I started collecting since, obviously, they couldn't have had an immediate impact on me from the comicbook rack. Let's take a look.

Amazing Spider-Man 178 from March of 1978. A truly great cover. Aunt May dying! MJ in the hospital room! Where's Peter? Outside the window fighting the Green Goblin! Ross Andru at his best. This is what a comic book cover SHOULD be. This cover reaches out and grabs you... its tells you what's happening in the comic and MAKES you want to read it. This is the classic Marvel comic cover and even if you'd never read a comic before, you'd notice this.

Here we have Amazing Spider-man 238 from March 1983. Another great cover, this time by John Romita JR. A classic concept cover as this scene doesn't actually appear inside the issue but it gets the point across that the Hobgoblin is back and that means trouble for Spidey. Another example of a cover that would make you look twice if you saw it on the stands.

Here we have Amazing Spider-Man 298 from March 1988. A nice cover by Todd McFarlane showing the old Webhead in battle with a new villain named Chance. While lacking in any real background and muddled with too much webbing (a McFarlane trademark), it still possesses power and the ability to grab your eye from the rack.

Amazing Spider-Man 375 from March 1993. A decent cover by Mark Bagley. I enjoyed the Bagley run on Spider-man and this isn't indicative of his usual nice covers. This is more for the anniversary issue and, thereby, is more "high concept" than representational. Overall, it still invokes a reaction and makes you think something exciting is going to happen within the book.

Amazing Spider-man 432 from March 1998 by John Romita Jr again. By now the covers have begun to move away from the tried and true method of trying to lure readers in. Yes, we see Spidey on his knees and unmasked but by whom? Lightning eyes, the truly horrible logo and and other type on this cover obscure what little we can see of the actual artwork. This is also the first cover where we've lost the little rectangle box in the upper left with the star of the comics figure/face in it. I always loved that. This is also the first cover we've seen where the writer, penciller and inkers names appear on the cover. The first sign that the publishers are starting to think the creative team is a big selling point. I think this is a rather poor cover and it doesn't make me want to read this issue. Although some of that has to do with the fact that it tells you it's yet ANOTHER crossover story and thereby you will be forced to buy the other parts to enjoy this issue.

Here we have Amazing Spider-man 51 or 492 from March 2003. This is the time when Marvel couldn't decide if they should use the new numbering or the old numbering for the comic. This is a pointless cover. Totally nothing happening at all. I guess the thought process what the J. Scott Campbell draws hot women so let's have him draw MJ on the cover with Spidey small in the background. Why? What does this cover tell us? It tells us that Mary Jane knows how to walk and that when she does apparently guys look at her. Wow... what a revelation. Guys look at a beautiful and famous supermodel/actress when she walks down the street. I have no idea what happens in this issue and I have NO desire to read it. But I would imagine they figured that if Straczynski wrote it then they could put whatever they wanted on the cover and people would buy it. At this point, you KNOW the editors think that Straczynski is more important than Spider-man. They are so very wrong.

Here's the cover of Amazing Spider-Man 539 from March of 2007. This cover just sucks. You are bringing back the black costume and it's a shot of Spidey from the thighs up (at least I think it's from the thighs... it's too friggin dark to really know) just standing there. HE'S STANDING THERE! Doing nothing. It's a dark and utterly pointless cover. And here's the catch: It looks just like every other cover on comics today. The characters are just standing there posing like it's a JC Penney catalog instead of a comic book.

Where is the action? Where are the images that make you want to pick up the book, let alone make you want to read it? First, they did away with all cover text... nobody ever said anything on a comic cover unless it was a "wink, wink, nudge nudge" jokey cover. Eventually the trend in comics was to have their covers look like movie posters. What a stupid idea. No one goes to see a movie because of the fucking movie poster. No one walks by a theatre and sees the poster and says "Wow, look at that picture of Nic Cage and Jessica Biel! I want to see Next!" Comics are NOT movies and they never will be no matter how much the publishers wish they were. And they don't have to be... Comics are a legitimate and amazing artform that doesn't have to wish it was something else and doesn't have to be ashamed of what it is.

Yeah, covers today are lame and unoriginal. And, again, you have to look to the do nothing editors for that. Let's give em a hand!
They do a nice job, don't they?