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THIS WEEKS BLOG

*this weeks comics are below the blog!*

GREAT COVERS DO ONE THING

also

The WW2 generation were a bunch of degenerate crooks?

**first off, Only about 10% of you have been getting these emails since about Dec. It's not an issue on your end. I've had non-stop problems with the website and getting all the parts to communicate to each other since an update happened. I am 85% sure it's working now. You may have missed a entertaining rant or two, but nothing particularly crucial to my long term plans...so, we'll just move forward**

This time we're going to talk about comic book covers, and some odd historical idiosyncrasies of them.  Because I'm trying to come up with a better cover for the new series, than I have at the ready. I have one done, I've shown it to ya before...but... it's not a good cover. I'll explain precisely why, shortly.

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As I bloviate here, we'll all keep in mind that I... am not good at covers. It's a foreign skill set to me. Visual sequential storytelling, that's what I do. That is about problem solving your way to a good page, with some thought, skill, trial and error...

Ya scribble out the elements that are important. For instance...the monster has a guy pinned down on a car, one Army solder calls for support, another army solder pulls the guy off the car, The Army solder yells at the crowd as the monster is talking...that's what's important. Assuming you can make anything out in the mess of scribbles below. This is where I start. 

Random takes on what needs to be on the page...different camera angle possibilities, different options on what to focus on, how many panels for different aspects for the sake of pacing, ect.

the decisions boil down to which ways work best for the sake of the story you are telling. The story supersedes the art in that regard. 

It's a puzzle to solve. You can struggle your way there.

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That page, even when finished and polished, aint going to be a work of art. and that last panel, as far as artistic composition, is doing everything wrong. BUT as far as telling part of the story in a way that tells it best, working with the pages before and after, it does the job well. 

A cover is a single image and it either works or it don't, by itself, at first glance.  And in my experience a good idea/image either appears right away while I'm sketching or I'm doomed. It's more an instinct/talent based kind of thing. I'm sub par at that. To make matters more difficult, a good cover is more than just a well executed image.

 The cover I just showed you, just isn't a very good cover.  The job of the cover is to get people to pick it up and open it. It's job is not to be a cool looking poster.

 Below are a few examples of recent covers of comics that are also not good. I've got nothing against any of these illustrators, I think I've only met one of them, and for all I know this is what they were told to do. But these are bad covers, because they don't do the job.  

We got a very beautifully illustrated image of Spider-man...that will get someone to pick up that issue if they are already looking for a Spider-man comic book. There is nothing on that cover that will peak the interest of anyone in a comic book store, who wasn't already going to buy a Spider-man comic. For all intents and purposes that image isn't doing anything more for sales than the Spider-man logo. And that goes for all three.

If the cover did not get anyone interested in the book, that wasn't already going to buy it, then it did not do it's job. In that instance, they picked up the book they already wanted and it happened to have that cover on it. Get me?

A good cover image would be like what they call in the military a  "force multiplier". It interests the people looking for that title, AND it interests people who happen to see it, who were not. It gets readers of other comics to stop and look through it. (personally, I want my covers to attract the interest of people even if they don't read comics at all...but the rest of in industry presently seems content to forfeit those people.) One of the simplest paths to do that, and the surest way, and the obvious way, and the o.g. way...is to show something that is going on in the book, in a way that the passerby wants to see what happens inside.

It can be an obvious preview/glimpse of the story like those above or something more abstract, in that it shows what is going on in the book by conveying the tone of what goes on inside. Like these below...

 Side note on the abstract thing...there's only a handful of guys who've ever really been able to pull that off. It's a high risk maneuver. It either grabs people and speaks to them on a visceral level or becomes one of those covers that other illustrators marvel at, but no ordinary person buys.

Either way, pretty much everything outside of that basic concept of showing what happens in the book, is-being too smart by half/ trying to reinvent the wheel.

With that much now understood, all the basic principles of art apply to making a visually interesting cover image. And honestly, you can grasp everything you need to know about art composition in a day...hell these pages here are 90% of it...

(note, If you're someone who might make use of these, you can right click and open the pics in a new tab or download them to see them large enough to read)

From- Creative Illustration by Andrew Loomis

 From - The Art of Color ad Design by Maitland Graves  

Them's the basics - focal points, balance, page division...and the ole golden ratio ( what they call in filmmaking- the "rule of thirds" )

HOWEVER...over time, there have been outside forces unique to comics that added a wrinkle or two in making an effective composition for a cover.

Let's look at some golden age era standard "headlight cover/bondage covers"...those are terms used for basically putting a woman on the cover in peril of some kind, tied up and showing off boobs. these were all the rage in the 40s and early 50's...

Something in particular worth noticing about these covers. Have a guess?

misogyny?

I mean from a marketing aspect.

also misogyny.

Sigh...we'll get to that, I'm talking about the composition of the cover. They all have the woman on the left hand side.  The left hand side was prime real estate on a cover. It's less of a concern now with comic book stores having displays where the whole cover is seen. But back then, often the comic books were stacked sideways. So, you'd only see the left hand side of comics.

That left hand side of the cover had to win the day for you. If you're gonna have boobs on the cover, you put them on the left hand side. "never waste a boob" that's an old publishing adage.

It's diabolical in it's simplicity.  And frankly there comes a point where it's all ridiculous.

I guarantee no prostitutes were on the corner by the newsstand on Wednesdays. "Ah f*ck, Planet Comics comes out this week...I'm taking the day off. The last idiot couldn't get me untied for 20 minutes...go get a knife or a boyscout, dickhead. You're not paying me by the hour".

I will say, and this is ME, a degenerate lowlife, talking...it's a bit much, and very weird because of the massive number of such covers all during a specific period of time. ...this was ALL the greatest Generation's handy work. Probably a sociologist could tell what was going on here. 

Repressed sexual curiosity? PTSD? It was 100% the era when guys had come back from WW2 and were still trying to work things out mentally. Part of me wonders if it was appealing not so much via some sexual thing as it was... them coming back home and finding out the women took all their jobs, or the "Dear John" letters the G.I.'s got, hahaha.

" I understand honey, I was gone a long time and people get lonely. we'll just let by-gones be by-gones and move on.  I'd best get some drawing done..."

The prevalence of books with covers of this tone is hard to convey.  If I wanted to spend an afternoon googling, I could show several hundred such examples, all from that ten year time period. And, these comics were selling in the MILLIONS...PER ISSUE.

 Here's a shot of a newsstand back then, and while I can't see the covers...I put a star on each title that generally used this type of image.

Out of the 17 comic books on this rack, 6 of them are starred. 30%-ish?!

That's weird, right? again, this is me talking. It's not jumping out at me via poisoning the youth or misogyny bad...it's the volume, in tandem with the contrast of what we think of/have been shown the culture was in those days. Next time you see The Andy Griffith Show or Leave it to Beaver on MeTV think of these comics.

"Gee whiz Wally, ever since everyone came back from the war there sure are a lot of comic books with women being tied to sh*t and tortured"

Also, I'm looking at this in the reality of -someone drew this.  I'm trying to imagine submitting my sixth cover concept of the year, that is a woman tied up about to be tortured. Or getting my sixth cover assignment that is a woman tied up about to be tortured. There was something going on there that the creatives and/or buyers weren't admitting to themselves.

You do have to marvel at the detail and creativity.

 These kinda covers weren't prevalent before ww2 and they haven't been prevalent since the mid 50s.  Even the edgy underground comics of the 60s, 70s, 80s, didn't have this theme running through their covers. Hell, I can't even think of any from the horror intensive 90s indy era, except a few done basically as a parody of this stuff.

**Knowledgeable readers are probably thinking "they started the Comic Book Code in 1955, regulating lewd imagery, that's why it stopped". Nope...you could still have hostages on the cover, tied up even. Batman and robin were tied to stuff all the time. Nothing in the code against that. The trend just...stopped, burned itself out. **

If there's a sociologist looking to do a thesis, this is a thing that happened in the culture right after ww2..have at it.

Hmm...wait a minute...the 60s, 70s, 80s were times when female comic book readership dropped off.  Am I looking through the wrong end of the telescope here? Did it drop off because there was less of this stuff?  Were women buying these? to scratch some itch? Like how every woman I know watches serial killer documentaries and crime tv shows?

Anyways...back to cover composition...

There was the problem of the top 3 inches of the cover being dedicated to the title and publisher logos. This was actually a by-product of distribution more than branding. They all used this same format for the sake of getting paid. As in getting their check from the distributor.

Back in the day, comic/magazine distribution worked like this- The distributor sends the stores say...50 copies of every title, and the stores pays for what sold, and returns the rest. A "return" in this case, because the distributor didn't want to pay to have 40 copies of Whiz Comics back in their warehouse taking up space, was the store cutting off the top of the book cover which included the cover/publisher info and sending back that piece of each unsold comic as proof it didn't sell. The agreement was unsold copies were to be destroyed. Publishers got paid after the returns were counted.

So, at the top you needed to have the title/logo and the publisher logo, roughly the size of a bank check, in order for the distributor to do business efficiently.

Of course less scrupulous stores did not, in fact, destroy the unsold the coverless comics but sold them at discount. By "less scrupulous" we'll assume that was every single store that had a space to put them, where the distributor wouldn't see when dropping off new shipments. Which is why decades later you see old comics that are missing the top of the cover...

All the comics you run across with the top of the cover missing or the entire cover missing, that ain't because some five year ripped it off. It's because some store owner was ripping off the distributor. Their thinking being...even if I sell them for 50% off it's still all free money because I never had to pay for them.

These books are evidence of fraud having been committed against the good people of Gilbert Distribution, Fawcett Publications, and the like. And...in the cases where they mailed in their removed covers to the distributor, that's a FEDERAL CRIME.

Look at her up there, playing innocent. "I'm just a little Polish Grandma running a newsstand, barely getting by." ...You're going to jail bitch! I hope you like kissing girls because that's the only people you're gonna be able to kiss for the next ten years!

That's what all this is about...

I am wondering now how much of this did actually go on. Given human nature and that I see lots of old comics, that survived to this day, floating around with the top of the cover cut off... it must have been wide spread.

I'm way off track...

Those days are gone, it's mostly direct sales now. Which means the stores pay for the books flat out and if they don't sell they take the hit. So, now-a-days it's up to the publisher how big and even where the logo is gonna be.

 So...no need to worry about anything screwy composition wise, just make an awesome cover image, right? ...not exactly.

Now the cover had to win two battles. It had to get a person to pick it up BUT, before it could do that it had to get a store to order if from a catalogue. A catalogue that was several hundred pages, containing close to a thousand different comic books ( I kid you not). And that cover was going to be displayed in that catalogue at about 2x3 inches. SO...whatever image is going to be your cover, had best be simple, clear. A crap ton of detail isn't going to help and will probably hurt.

 The covers on the left side, that are intricately detailed, probably looked great in person...but at 2x3 inches they are a muddy a mess. Whereas the comic called "FORGE" with nothing but a white samurai sword on the cover, jumps right out at you. Much like putting boobs on the left hand side being effective in the past, having large simple images with a lot of contrast was the way of the savvy illustrator.

Of course there is the dilemma that a cover that grabs someone's eye in a catalogue might not be that compelling in person. That samurai sword jumps out in a catalogue...but on the shelf is there any reason I'd want to pick in up? Maybe, maybe not. It doesn't visually make much of a case for whatever story is inside.

I...just between you, me and the walls...would often pull a fast one on the distributor and send in a cover image that was ONLY made for the sake of standing out in the catalogue, and the ACTUAL cover was something that would stand out, in person, on the shelves. You were NOT supposed to do that. If you sent them an image that was not the cover, you could get in big trouble and even dropped by the distributor.

Here's a pro-tip if you're going to play fast and loose with the rules, make sure you're making everyone money. And lest I paint myself as some, smarter than everyone else, renegade. I'm not the only one who thought of this. I may have been the most egregious, but there were a few publishers who'd send in black and white versions (technically...it was the cover image) for the sake of standing out amongst the colored images on the page.

Anyways...With distribution recently going exclusively to online ordering only and no longer having a catalogue...all previous constraints and idiosyncrasies of layout out a cover are gone,  and there's nothing to deal with except that both the logo and the upc bar code have to go...somewhere.

With all that in mind...I still need a cover for the new issue.

The wrinkle here is that there is a lot in the first issue that I do not want to give away on the cover. If not for that I could grab an image right off of page 6 that'd sell the book for sure. It's a decision here to go with the obvious winner and forfeit the impact of the story, or put in the work and find another way.

 Here's a rough sketch I like, out of several pages of sketches of crappier ideas.

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*In case you can't make it out, That's money in the air, and buildings in the background, and you got the idea of what the monster looks like in the first cover I showed you*

Referring to the art textbook pages I showed previously, THIS composition...is trash.

It misses the Golden Ratio, and it has no "focal point". Half the emphasis is on the monster eyes on top and the other is on the woman on the bottom...neither main character is in the center of the composition/focal point...that area has cash and background buildings. And it's probably a toss up as far as if the cash it leads the viewers eye down to the woman or up to the monster.

I tried the buildings a few different ways hoping that would magically fix this...and brought the monster faces down a bit.

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  That's the thing about knowing the fundamentals. You can take a poor composition and do some work to it and...it doesn't help at all. Hahahahaha.  Maybe no background at all is better? Just some of the Basil Wolverton-esq uneven background lines?

It's a cool creepy effect, that simple zip-a-tone/computer shading doesn't quite match. It's more...unsettling in it's imperfection.  If you're wondering how ole Basil did that. I'll tell you because I used to do it from time to time. What you do is...ink 78thousand lines right next to each other.

And it is as tedious as it sounds and now you know why you never see that effect much anymore. BACK in the day...when printers used cameras and not scanners, illustrators would work very large. Like say 24x36. Which I am guessing is much easier on the eyes, and fingers that trying to do this type effect at 11x17 page size.

ANYHOOO...I do have the skills to do that when it's worth it. Let's try it small and see...

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hmm...meh...

I  would just say "screw it" and move on, but while monkeying around with it...this happened.

THAT is the best I have ever drawn hair...ever. It'd be a shame to not publish the one time I actually drew hair correctly.

As I type out these concerns I realize that I did begin this dive by saying that job one is to get people to pick it up, not be a cool poster. So...the composition being bad is irrelevant if I think the image is going to get people to wonder wtf is going on and want to find out.  I think this has a fighting chance at that, but it's not a slam dunk.

The main problem then is - the monster faces towards the top are likely to be covered by the title/logo.

I could maybe try doing the ole sideways logo or even something really understated like this Batman cover. 

I dunno...something tells me the cover with the woman and the cash is a winner, even though technically it sucks. It is better than the first one...

Anyways...

ah hell...I forgot to re-upload the folder with all the comics. uhm...I'll give you extra comics next time. or, you could buy some. That's an option I keep forgetting to mention.

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