Day 6 -- CLA$$WAR #6

This CLA$$WAR #6 cover is a great contrast in light and dark. The explosion bathes the entire scene in warm, bright colors. And yet the scene is utterly dark and destructive.

Contrast. That's what CLA$$WAR was all about. One of the few superhero comics to take the disparity between the American Dream and the American Reality seriously, the comic did what more mainstream fare like The Authority did not. Now, I liked the Authority, at least under Warren Ellis, but what writer Rob Williams was frankly better. Sure the Authority talked about cleaning up the world, and they took up a bunch of refugees once, but really all they did was make throwaway comments about politicians and get drunk on their celebrity.

The American, the focus of CLA$$WAR, is out to reveal the dirty superhero doings of America, the hypocrisy of his drug-addicted, assassinating, depraved comrades. He's a real idealist, and sure a Superman stand-in, confronted with the reality. But where the Authority ramps up the violence and treats the world's suffering superficially, this comic pits the superhero with an ex-CIA agent trying to reveal the undercover truth to the people.

The mushroom explosion on the cover is America's response, and the result of a great deal of intrigue and philosophizing up to that point. And it doesn't happen off the cuff. It's planned and premeditated violence on a small island nation already screwed by American capitalism.

So, not a subtle cover. The image of a lone American on the cover facing the explosion, an aircraft carrier, and a couple of battleships. The battleships are nice and detailed, although the close details are lost in the glare of the explosion.

Good cover. Great comic.

Day 5 -- Weapon Brown

I have deep and abiding love for Peanuts and Charles Schulz. And a deep and abiding love for satire and parody.

Bless you, Jason Yungbluth: you satisfied both. Weapon Brown was a great little one-shot that took the characters of Peanuts lore and thrusts them into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, gritty and nasty to the ridiculous. Patty runs a whorehouse. Marcy is one of her "girls." Linus is a mad occultist for the Cthulhu-like Great Pumpkin. Lucy is a mad scientist.

Charlie Brown is the tough, violent loner Weapon Brown. A gun-toting macho-man with a cybernetic arm surviving as a grifter and mercenary. He's just a round-headed kid.

The comic wasn't just a dig on Charlie Brown. It was a dig on the nuclear fears of the 50's where the Peanuts were born, and a comment on the hyperviolent, "dark'n'gritty" comics of the 90's. The majority of the cover is black-and-white, with a malevolent-looking Weapon Brown standing tall. He looks backlit, with the bulk of body dark and sharp, the white spaces showcasing the lines of muscles and the mechanics of his robot arm. The legs fade into the title below. Only the ripped and tattered yellow shirt with the black zigzag and the title below are in color. The title itself stands out because it's modeled on the more popular gritty comics of the time, like Wolverine, Weapon X, or Deadpool, the letters sharp and hard.

In short, it's ridiculous fun. But with depth if you want to look for it. Think, "What if Frank Miller wrote Peanuts?" This is pretty much it.

Got any parodies you love with awesome covers?

Day 4 -- The Path: Prequel

The Path: Prequel was one of the titles put out by the late Crossgen. What became of The Path and all the other Crossgen titles is one of the great cautionary comics tales of all time.

And I'm not going to rehash it here, but bringing up Crossgen is timely with the strange journey a couple of former Crossgen titles are taking via Disney to be reborn at Marvel.

Don't worry about all that name-dropping; just look at the pretty picture.

As evidenced by the katana stabbed into the earth, The Path was all about samurai. Specifically a pseudo-Japan modeled on the dramatic Sengoku period. Of course, it wasn't really Japan except when it needed to be culturally. It was on an alien planet somewhere. The entire series was drenched in samurai motifs, with a monk leading a samurai rebellion against the evil, supernatural emperor.

War, intrigue, doomed romance, loyalty, and blood ran in every issue. It was a glorious, methodical adventure tale penned by Ron Marz, who's no slouch in the action/intrigue department.

But we're here to talk about the cover. The legendary Bart Sears (who, for my money, spent his best years at Valiant) designed the cover with pencils. It is deceptively simple: just a sword sticking up in the field. The colors are lush red and orange, with the sword in barely silhouette and the grass and foreground in total black. Sears is much better known for heavily muscled but fluid superhuman physiques, but the early The Path covers were simple, natural scenes and great exercises in reserve and simplicity for an otherwise usually extravagint artist.

A ton of storytelling is in that lone sword, however. The wind moves the grass and the tassels on the hilt, implying the action rather than showcasing. Blood runs down the blade and into the ground in a helter-skelter zigzag. The sky and overlarge sun give two messages simultaneously. A dawn and a dusk. A beginning of the story, and an end to a story finished already. Violence before and after.

And buried just under the blood and dirt beneath the blade is an object. This is the mystical tool the main character carries throughout the series, very similar to Tibetan ritual objects. A hint at the supernatural forces that creep into the comic.

And if you the supernatural carries one away from traditional samurai drama, you need to watch Throne of Blood again.

What do you think is a great samurai cover? Or do you remember the Crossgen titles, and what was your favorite?

Day 3 -- Justice League America Annual #4

Great covers aren't necessarily about great art. Sometimes they just fit the right moment. Justice League America Annual #4 is one of those. My favorite line-up of the Justice League was the late 1980's. These were not the days of the iconic, high-profile Morrison run with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and all the other A-listers.

These were The Other Guys. Yep, just like the movie.

And this annual was The Other Other Other Guys.

Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis set out to put the funny back in funny books, and BWAHAHAHAHA! echoed across the pages. A smart, hideously clever kind of humor. The cover to the annual was a continuation of themes set up by prior series. Justice League America #1 had been a group shot of the Justice Leaguers assembled for a photo with smirks and Guy Gardner mouthing off. Justice League Europe #1 had been the European branch assembled with the same pose and a shrugging Captain Atom.

So this annual introduced the wildest concept yet: Justice League Antarctica. The League of the time might not get respect, but these weren't just C-list heroes; they were villains. Except for G'nort, the most annoying Green Lantern ever, the Antarctica team was formerly the Injustice Leage: Major Disaster, Big Sir, Clock King, Cluemaster, Multi-Man, and the Mighty Bruce. Incompetant supervillains who decide to be good guys because they suck as villains.

So the cover of them assembled but facing the wrong way, backs to the audience, is classic. Perfect. It gets across the picture that this is a team of losers. Real losers. And the book knows it, mining the joke for all its worth.

Find this gem, eat some Oreos, drink some milk, read and let the milk shoot out your nose.

So what's your favorite funny cover, or series?

Day 2 -- Aria: The Uses of Enchantment #1

Two comic book artists brought the technique of painting over lush pencils back into comic books in the 1990's: David Mack (discussed in the previous post) and Alex Ross. Ross was known for his cover work as well as both Kingdom Come and the character designs in Earth X. And a little Oscar poster.

But this isn't bout Alex Ross.

It's about Jay Anacleto.

Aria was a small comic book from Image put out in the early part of the 2000's, when Image was rehabilitating its image as a second-string superhero factory born of an initial shot heard 'round the comics industry. The newer Image was becoming an imprint known for genre-defying work with high production values and niche marketability. Aria was the story of an Earth-bound faerie living in New York City (published just prior to Fables). The story was solid and the characters compelling, but that alone would not have given the title breakout success.

Anacleto's luscious artwork did that. The pencils were light and textured with shadow, the figures refreshingly soft after a decade's worth of hard, dark-lined, angular superheroes. But the real trick was the coloring. The painting of the figures was smudged and airy, somewhat ethereal like the nature of the main characters, but soft to the point of photorealism.

Mack's gift is in the confluence of design elements that reveal a picture left unpainted. The characters in a Ross painting still uses models as a base but retain that explosive Kirby aspect of superhuman form and heroic posing. Anacleto's figures glide across a page or drape themselves across a cover.

Pictured above is the cover of Aria: The Uses of Enchantment #1. While Anacleto did not do the artwork on subsequent Aria mini-series after the first (he moved on to @thena Inc.), he remained with the creators to do most Aria covers. This one shows off his sense of shadow and texture to the fullest. The cityslicker Aria above is lounging by the water, smiling. Her clothes look as soft as velvet, the wrinkles and creases natural and slight. The sheen of daylight reflects off her jeans and shirt.

Below is the reflected image of her and her environment. Dressed in a fairy-tale princess gown and repeating the same lounging motion, you can see the billowing nature of the fancy dress and the intricate details of the embroidery in both the fabric and the brighter sleeves. Behind her is a detailed castle with battlements and towers and even a few flying dragons.

But what sets the whole thing apart is the misty use of the water. It obscures the image as it reveals the dual nature of Aria herself. The blurring is most evident on the castle, leaving the image of Aria herself clear enough to discern the patterns on the dress.

I'm not sure, but they may have achieved the softened art of Aria through the same technique initially used on Dark Horse's revamped Conan series: leaving the original pencils uninked and applying color directly over pencils.

So, did you ever read any Aria? What did you think? What do you think of painted covers over more traditional inked plus color covers or even digital ones?

Edit: I repeatedly misspelled Jay Anacleto's name. My apologies to the artist. All fixed.

Day 1 -- Kabuki: Dreams of the Dead

You can't go wrong starting with David Mack. One of the best new artists to emerge working on independent comics in the 90's, Mack was hardly a cartoonist or illustrator or penciller or inker or even author. He was just a very gifted artist. His Kabuki: Circle of Blood series was breathtaking ink work and a compelling story that merged art and words with cyberpunk aesthetics and Japanese traditions.

By Dreams of the Dead, the Sin City style of black-and-white art with negative/positive space highlighting gave way to Mack's ability to buy paint. And gorgeously paint he did. The cover's butterfly and swirling petals reflect the transitory nature of life and death, and the two images on the cover represent Kabuki herself. On the left, in the background, is Kabuki as the Japanese government assassin and pop celebrity. On the right, the foreground, is a kimono clad Kabuki. Her eyes are closed in contemplation. No doubt the viewer has an immediate sense of duality and dreamlike transitioning.

And, on that note, the entire corpus of Kabuki (there's a lot of Kabuki comics out there, all collected in trades) is about duality and transitioning between identities, finding the true ones that are right for each individual.

David Mack never set out to do just a simple cyberpunk story. You can see it in a cover like this. Or any of the album covers or more "serious" artworks he did later.

Do you have a favorite David Mack cover? Or one similar?

30 Days of Comic Book Covers -- Day 0

Salutations, Dear Reader.

I have decided to resurrect this musty old blog. Originally it was for a class writing assignment, but for now classes are far behind me. I have decided to give it a new purpose.

There is a wealth of memes running around the internet nowadays, an overabundance and embarrassment of "show me yours, I'll show you mine" type stuff running around sites like Facebook. And I'm as guilty as all the other folks out there eagerly pushing their songs, their photos, their their whatever can be show once a day for 30 days items.

So I'm going to, for the next 30 days, show you something: 30 great comic book covers.

Geekily niche enough?

Now, I can't claim these are the greatest covers ever. I don't feel like trolling all through the internet to find every cover ever. Once, I had a collection of over 5,000 comics. It's since dwindled to 500. Out of those I've picked 30 covers that I scanned and believe are worth checking out for one reason or another.

And no, I'm not adding a "A comic you love right now" or "A comic you used to love but now hate" kind of theme. Just 30 covers.

Let me know what you think. Post any you like. Oh, and...

Excelsior!

(You get a no-prize if you know where that's from...)