Covers

Ian Brill links to an awesome Marvel cover from the 70s: The Fantastic Four vs. Godzilla. It's the kind of cover that would leap out at you from the quarter bin, because it's just that awesome a cover.

Problem is, I suspect, that the story inside doesn't come anywhere near the scenario the cover makes you imagine. I wonder if that's not where so much of the appeal of comics, particularly long-running shared-universe superhero comics, comes from. Once you've got a basic knowledge of who characters are, covers invite you to fill in the blanks yourself. This cover would be really silly if you didn't know who the Fantastic Four were. But if you know Reed's a brilliant scientist, Ben's a brawler, the FF has faced lots of monsters, and so on, you start to wonder if Sue's force-field can contain Godzilla, or if Godzilla's radioactive breath can put out Johnny's flame or make Ben sweat, and so on. It's not all that different from the thought-process that takes place between panels, it just happens on a larger scale and draws on more of the reader's existing knowledge of characters and situations.

That Julie Schwartz fella, I think he was onto something with having the writers try to come up with stories for covers that had already been drawn.