Thursday, June 15, 2017

DC Comics Best Covers of the Week 6/14/17

A Week of Wacky

Boy, there are some crazy-looking covers in the list this week, the recently-published Looney Tunes crossover books must be infecting every creative. I'm not complaining, though! Sometimes a cluttered, creepy cover is the best thing to sell a comic book. So let's stop vacillating and start critiquing covers, shall we?


HONORABLE MENTION
Martian Manhunter Marvin the Martian Special #1 variant
Stephen DeStefano
Okay, this is a plenty nice, colorful cover, but it normally wouldn't make my list except that it is genuinely pretty funny. This definitely owes, in part, to the diminutive Marvin carrying oversized tanks, as well as the cartoonish surface of Mars. This cover tells you that what's within is gags and yuks, and definitely makes me interested to check it out.






Suicide Squad #19 variant
Whilce Portacio & Alex Sinclair
This cover is actually sort of cluttered and confusing, but I had to pick it because it's so insane. A (decidedly hairy-looking) Killer Croc using a youthful Cyborg Superman as a weapon against Deadshot? Katana about to behead the Eradicator in granny sunglasses while riding piggyback? None of this happens in the issue, but it sure gives one pause to think.






Justice League of America #8 variant
Doug Mahnke
Well, it's just Lobo, Batman and Vixen hanging out on a well-rendered dinosaur. I like to imagine the dinosaur isn't dead, just kind of lazily hanging out with these members of the JLA. The reddish-purple of the dinosaur (Barney?) helps offset the nearly black & white looks of Lobo and Batman--Vixen's yellow costume adds the pop that would otherwise be handled by a glowing sun or some other light source.






Red Hood and the Outlaws #11 variant
Guillem March
This looks like something you'd see on the cover of a comic from the Underground Comix scene. The super stylized sound effects and faded coloring really give this a mid-20th century vibe. I didn't realize that this was the members of the Outlaws fighting each other until I scrutinized the image, it's all limbs and bike tires at a glance.






Supergirl #10
Robson Rocha and Daniel Henriques
How important is perspective in illustrating? It's this important. The cover has great depth, and triumphant Supergirl in the foreground with the more panicked and limbs-akimbo Batgirl towards the back makes it really dynamic. That creepy monster hand is like the icing on the cake, but it's that icing between the two cakes acting as mortar to make a taller cake. Supergirl's fist would be the outside icing.






Titans #13
Kenneth Rocafort
This cover is altogether ooky! The distended, monstrous forms of the Titans themselves are cool enough, but the watercolor-esque coloring makes this image something special. Almost looks like a children's book, one designed to scare the bejeezus out of little kids. Which is a children's book I would endorse, incidentally. The negative space in the corner is necessary to make the monsterized superheroes even more threatening.

1 comment:

  1. God forgive me for saying anything good about JLA, but I love that cover.
    1. JLA
    2. Titans
    3. Red Hood & The Outlaws
    4. Suicide Squad
    5. Superhero
    Screw that Marvin the Martian cover, because if it isn't Coyote, Tazz, or Daffy I don't care.

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