Good Morning everyone!

I hope that you all enjoyed Baman, Piederman, and Tuba, a true force for good in the universe. Today being the lovely Sunday that it is, I thought that I would grab a nice cup of coffee, go visit the long box library, and read a few comic series that I greatly enjoyed as youngling, cementing the comic’s greatness in my mind (I still love me some BATMAN: LONG HALLOWEEN), or helping me realize what horrible taste I had in comics as a child (yes, BRUTE FORCE, I am talking about you).

As I began my digging, I ventured into the “X-men” box, where I came across this:

There was something about this comic that made me pause for a moment. It wasn’t the story, I recall “The Phalanx Covenant” being rather pedestrian. It wasn’t the art, although I am a fan of any and all Kuberts. It was the cover. You see, all these neat phalanx tie-in books had a mid-nineties, super-cool, chrome stripe running along the left side of the books. This was the first cover where I ever recognized branding on a cover. This got me thinking about how the comic book cover had evolved over the years.

The comic book cover has always been vital to comic success. If the cover sucks, I know that I am not going to give that book a shot. Back in the ‘30s and ‘40s you would see covers like the ones above, a striking image, the comic title, and maybe a blurb about what to expect inside. It was clean, it was clear, and at the time, it was what grabbed the attention of would-be comic buyers. As comics moved forward into the 1950s, there was a wider variety of genres available to people. The cover made it easy to distinguish between your horror comics and your superhero comics.

Pretty easy to figure out which is which, right? It’s not just the picture, the coloring is different, the brightly colored backgrounds for the kiddies, the spooky lighting for the horror book. Even the font has become more diverse, helping to differentiate the books. Hooray for diversity!

While the comic code got rid of a lot of diversity in comics, covers in the 1960s started using more and more text bubbles on covers. There was still an eye catching image on the cover, but text was used to attract readers to the story hiding inside. Observe the glory of BUBBLE!

In the 1970s things started to get crazy. Just one character on a cover was no longer enough. The covers of this era were almost an extra page of story, almost all the characters had speech or thought bubbles, and there was still a blurb about the story inside. It seemed the goal was to have the busiest cover possible, because that’s what the younger reader base was looking for. It was like warfare on the eyes.

Luckily sanity was soon restored. After a decade of ocular dishevelment, the 1980s brought back the more focused single image. The fonts continued to evolve as well. Comic book readers were growing up, and the covers started to show it.There were still a fair amount of words on the page, but it was at a greatly reduced rate.

The 1990s saw a renewed variety in comics, and a myriad of cover styles typified the growth of the medium. Superhero comics went back towards the singular, more iconic image, darker books, like DC’s Vertigo line and Dark Horse brought out elements that set them apart from the kiddie stuff, and in cases like the “Phalanx Covenant” cover branding was even used.

As the new millennium has dawned, the single cover image is back and branding has became even more important. Big “Event” books now have a special trade dress to delineate them from other books, and whole imprints, like Marvel’s Ultimate line, share a trade dress.

One thing that I have noticed as these covers become more and more elaborate is that the smaller publishers seem to stick with the strong single image. While the “Big two” of Marvel and DC continue to use these branding techniques, the smaller guys don’t, and I do not know why. I would think that independent publishers would be free to be the most creative, but most just stick with what has already been established. Don’t get me wrong, this is not a negative comment towards my fellow small pressers, just a curiosity.

So over the years as the comic reader has grown, so has the art of the cover. I, for one,  cannot wait to see what the next decade brings us.

Thanks for stopping in everyone, see you all tomorrow.