Article 10: Embedded Coverage

What does it take to make a comic book cover stand out on the shelves? Amid a sea of Marvel pin-ups, how does a title keep its identity while calling out to potential readers? Paul O'Brien wades in.
16 February 2004

The comic book cover should, in theory, be an important part of the package. After all, it's the first thing you see. A good cover can be immensely valuable. It attracts attention on the shelves. Like a credits sequence, it sets a tone for the story to follow. And it can just make the comic a nice object to look at.

Unfortunately, the standard of comic book covers is less than impressive - and, among the major publishers, outright monotony prevails. When was the last time that your attention was actually drawn by a cover, for example? Granted, if they're all fighting for your attention, then the majority of them are bound to fail - by definition, they can't all stand out from the crowd. But a really good cover, one that leaps off the shelf, is depressingly rare.

Marvel is by far the worst offender here. A couple of years back, Marvel decided that as an almost invariable rule, its covers should feature generic pin-up art of one or more of the lead characters. Quite why somebody thought that this was a good idea, I have no clue. It practically guarantees that they'll all blur into one. A handful of titles seem to have escaped the edict - X-STATIX, for example, tends to do covers directly related to the story. And MARVEL 1602 has actually had some thought put into it.

But most just settle into a metronomic routine of pin-ups. Quite genuinely, I often can't tell simply from the cover whether I've even read a Marvel book. I have to check the contents. Can you blame me, when X-TREME X-MEN ran context-free cover pin-ups of Storm by Salvador Larrocca, for four consecutive issues? It's not Larrocca's fault; it's just an indication of how limited the approach is.

Other publishers are less hidebound by bizarre theories of what makes a good cover, but still fall back on the same old ideas again and again. Yes, they're pretty, but god they're repetitive. How many times did Tim Bradstreet do "moody protagonist stands in front of a wall"?

The good news, however, is that when the general standard of covers is this monotonous, it shouldn't be all that hard to stand out. A good strong design idea that takes the comic out of the norm has a good chance of getting noticed. The DC Focus books at least have a distinct look to them, and don't have the appearance of normal superhero comics. I'm not quite sure what specific message they send, but at least they say, "I'm different". WILDCATS has had some clever, pseudo-corporate covers - not that they've done much good when it comes to sales, admittedly LOVE FIGHTS stands out a mile, through a combination of minimalism and recurring design themes (the hearts, the limited colours) - from that point of view, it's got some of the best covers around.

It's possible to overshoot, of course, by being too tricksy. PLANETARY and PROMETHEA have both experimented with wild changes in their design from issue to issue, to match the contents of the individual story. In theory this is a nice idea, and certainly helps set the tone for the story. Often it worked; sometimes the design had drifted so far from the norm for the title that readers were fairly likely to miss it altogether.

Micah Wright has another approach, for his book STORMWATCH: TEAM ACHILLES. He's going old school, by bringing back the sort of cover that went out of fashion some twenty years ago - a snapshot from the story, complete with dialogue.

Wright argues that most covers these days fail dismally to convey any sense of what the story's about. There's no hook into the narrative - in fact, not even any hint of narrative. And so far as mainstream action books are concerned, of course, he's absolutely right. You're left selling the book on the basis of a pretty piece of art showing a superhero or soldier who, frankly, probably looks much like any other superhero or soldier, and who's probably drawn by a completely different artist on the interior pages. It's not exactly informative.

This way does at least push the story, and Wright says that he's fought for it for months. Interestingly, he claims to reject the argument that "Cover text is too kiddie". Strictly speaking, that position is correct as far as it goes. But the cover that's actually been produced as a result of Wright's efforts is, if not kiddie, certainly self-consciously corny. Characters strike dramatic poses and declaim cliches: "Enough talk! This ends now!" "Santini, don't! He's innocent!" Combined with a strangely retro new logo, the general impression is that the series has its tongue slightly in cheek about the whole thing.

In fact, while STORMWATCH isn't a comedy book, it does have enough self-aware humour to get away with this sort of cover. Tucked away in the commercial backwaters of DC's Eye of the Storm imprint for 'mature readers' superhero books, it's interesting that it's positively trying to look as mainstream as possible (albeit that it's the mainstream of the 1980s) instead of trying to distance itself from that side of the genre.

That said, it's been so long since speech balloons were used regularly on covers that any comic taking this approach is inevitably going to look dated - or consciously retro, depending on the way it's done. In either event, it's not a technique that would work for most books. Wright can be fairly confident that STORMWATCH is not going to spawn a wave of imitators. For him, that ought to be good news. It means that his book will have a distinct look that stands out on the shelves.

But it's possible to tie the cover to the story content more explicitly without returning wholesale to the style of a bygone era. You can do text-free covers drawing on some particularly good visual from the comic, or try and work the mini-story scene into a more modern design. On that wider point, Wright is correct; it's something that publishers should do more often. After all, I know perfectly well that FLASH is going to feature a story about the Flash. Putting a picture of the Flash on the cover tells me absolutely nothing. Tell me something about the particular issue and you might just attract my attention.

That's not to say that there isn't a place for the straightforward pin-up cover. It's a perfectly decent type of cover in its own right, which is why it became so boringly dominant in the first place. But the pendulum has swung far too far in favour of making pretty pictures, instead of actually selling the comic and intriguing the audience. Close your eyes; can you remember what the last comic you read had on the cover?

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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