I was up late into the night with the Semantink design team, working hard on the trade dress for our first MYTHOI graphic novel. Now, before you get too excited, the first GN is still several months away, but it is going to look awesome. The reason I bring all this up is because I wanted to talk about all the hard work that goes into designing the beautiful books you flip through when you are killing time at the local book store.

The biggest step in the design process is the overall layout of the book. Where will all the elements go? Will the cover have one large piece of artwork, or several smaller ones? Will the art wrap around to the back or end on the front? There is an ungodly amount of design decisions that could mean success or failure on the stands. Let’s look at the front cover first.

The standard for front covers on graphic novels, especially superhero books, is to have one large image adorning the front cover with the book title scrawled across the top of book. Having this large image is a great attention grabber, but lacking in originality. Here are a few examples of the straight forward cover layout:

While the single large image is a great way to get attention, some books strive originality in their design, hoping to grab attention with design instead of pictures. Y: THE LAST MAN and HELLBOY are great examples of emphasizing design over artwork.

Whatever the layout, the cover has to be exciting enough to draw readers in. Just as I wont talk to an ugly girl, no matter how wonderful her personality, if a cover doesn’t grab me, I’m not going to open the book.

Another design element that is a key to sales success is the book spine. When graphic novels are all lined up in the book store with only the spines showing, how does one grab a new reader?

The run of the mill spine will contain the books title, volume (if necessary), publisher, and creators. This is all usually set with a single color and an attention grabbing typeface. Books like SANDMAN will use bands of color to make the book stick out on the shelf. For books that are part of a large series, it’s important to have to have continuity between volumes. THE WALKING DEAD has the same typeface and text placement on each spine, but a different color for each volume.

Finally, there is the back cover. The back cover contains odds and ends that just don’t fit anywhere else. Some of the things commonly found on the back cover are quotes from other professionals, a story synopsis, and the bar code. Sometimes art will grace the back cover, but from a design standpoint, its the red headed step child of the book.

If the layout of a graphic novel is it’s skeleton, then the art used on the book is the muscle and skin. No matter how good the layout is, a bad piece of cover art can kill it. By the same token, even if a GN layout isn’t great, a spectacular piece of art can save it. The key to the best covers is to make an image that will pop off the shelves at readers and tell a story at the same time. As an example, let’s take a look at one of the most well respected graphic novels of all time, WATCHMEN:

WATCHMEN’s cover doesn’t just ask to be read, it smacks you in the face and says ” Take me home or I’ll break a bottle on your head.” The art isn’t even very complex, but the bright color and the rather disturbing blood stain draws the reader in. As an example of a graphic novel that doesn’t work as well, let’s take a look at THE TEEN TITANS: JUDAS CONTRACT

To be fair, this was made in the 1980’s, but looking at this cover doesn’t make you want to buy it, it makes you want to throw up a little bit. The image is overly busy and the color is (for lack of a better word) yucky. Also, the more iconic your image is, the better. Just about any comic book fan can spot that WATCHMEN cover and know that it’s the Watchmen, but without the title, many would have no idea what the TEEN TITANS is.

One final element to consider when putting together a trade paperback is the typeface that will be used. Will you use a standard font, or create your own? THE WALKING DEAD has a unique font that sticks out and fits the book well, while BATMAN: YEAR ONE has a standard font, that doesn’t pop as much, but still fits the book.

The most important thing about selecting typeface is making sure that it fits the book. A heavy Gothic font doesn’t fit with a futuristic cop story. While it’s important to have your title pop out at people it still has to fit the book.

Creating a good looking trade dress is a lot of work, but the results can be spectacular. When I look at books like WATCHMEN  and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS (another iconic trade) I think about how good a TPB can look, and I get excited for our own Semantink trades. That’s it for today folks, thanks for stopping in. If you haven’t gotten a chance yet, check out our latest issue of MYTHOI, MYTHOI Births: YUKI. And if you haven’t checked out the other MYTHOI Birth issues (also free!) do so now!

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.