Great comic book covers

[Otomofan]

Dark Knight III The Master Race turned out to be a pretty lackluster affair, but the covers....my god, the covers were amazing! The variant covers that is. Basically everyone in the industry who loved DKR when they were coming up (which is everyone) wanted to do homage covers to the original story.

All of the beautiful variant covers were just collected in a hardcover last week and I highly recommend it. Nobody does it like Jim Lee though...his takes on the original Dark Knight imagery is just legendary:









My favorite Miller variant wasn't from the regular series but from the crappy Last Crusade one shot. Sadly, this image is not reproduced in the hardcover:



And here are the amazing Bill Sienkiewicz's takes:





Greg Capullo did this beauty:



The wonderful John Cassady:



And the main man himself, Simon "The Biz" Bisley....I love that he's not afraid to give a thirteen year old girl curves and pokey nipples. It's nice to see he's stayed true to his artistic vision after all these years!

 

[Otomofan]

OK, a few more...I can't help it, these are so good!

More Greg Capullo:





The one and only Brian Bolland:


I don't know who this Chris Burnham is but these were really clever and well done:




The masterful Bruce Timm:


And a nice one in John Romita JR's signature style:



I think I'll go back and start looking again for all time favorite covers from all manner of comics...I really enjoyed doing that earlier in the thread.

But as a preview, this isn't exactly a cover necessarily but it's a poster for the manga DOMU by my all time favorite Otomo Katsuhiro. (It was used as the cover for the collection in several overseas versions.) This was just included in a collection of reprints of some of his favorite posters from his career. Just look at this image! The white negative space framing the clean geometric lines of the building design....the guy is a genius. One of the best artists I've ever seen.

 

[RIDDICK]

Capullo's are the only good ones.
Simple but effective and not overly generic.

 

[generalszabo]

Capullo is great but Jim Lee is the boss. I bought all the hard cover master race collector's editions showing his pencil art, just perfection

 

[RIDDICK]

Jim Lee's covers are generic AF, come on!

 

[Otomofan]

Jim Lee generic? Blasphemy!!

I still think he did his best work on X-Men, (and I'm sure everyone else in the world agrees) but I particularly enjoy this Dark Knight stuff cause he's getting to live out his own fanboy dreams. Like everyone else in comics, DKR was a huge influence on him.

I remember anxiously awaiting Legends of the Dark Knight number 50, cause it was going to contain the first ever pin up of Batman by Jim Lee. This was in 93 or so....Lee had only done Marvel and Image work so seeing him do a DC character was gonna be mindblowing! Remember, all we had for hype back then was Wizard...no internet other that stuff like usenet.

So I got the issue.....and there was Jim Lee's Batman:



I was.....let down. I wanted to see the ultra detailed X-Men style Jim Lee Batman! But he was so clearly enamored with DKR and Frank that he chose to ape his style. He'd finally get around to doing "his" Batman several years later with "Hush" and all that, but this was not what I had in mind.

I've since come to appreciate it though.

Around that time, he was also doing a few pages here and there for Deathblow. (He couldn't be bothered to finish it and eventually Tim Sale took over.) His Deathblow style was also done in a blatant Frank Miller style:



And don't think Frank didn't notice! Look who Marv is roughing up in Dame to Kill For:



Obviously there are no hard feelings all these years later. After all, they collaborated on All Star Batman, which was.....well. You know.

 

[Otomofan]

Say what you will about Rob Liefeld....he probably deserves it. But if you were a middle schooler in the early 90s, chances are, you loved his stuff as much as I did. I tried several times over the years to go back and revisit it....but it's all pretty much crap. Still....at the time, there was nothing like him.




ahem

anyway...








And after that he was gone, off to do Youngblood (which I eagerly bought but was so disappointed in) and they brought in a fill-in artist. The fill artist did his best to imitate Rob's terrible artwork but it was just phony. You could tell it wasn't the genuine Liefeld. A few issues later and Greg Capullo was the regular artist, and he did a much better job than Rob ever did. Designed new costumes, had a proper understanding of anatomy, etc. He had a great run on X-Force. Still...wasn't the same without Rob.

 

[Plastic Bateman]

Jim Lee's covers are generic AF, come on!

I've grown to like Jim Lee a lot more than I ever used to watching the various videos and livestreams he's been putting out of himself drawing. He's astonishingly clean and efficient and a font of solid drafting advice.

Also that first Liefeld cover only looks good because McFarlane inked it. I'd forgotten just how horrible Liefeld's own lines could be...

 

[Otomofan]

 

[Surge Diaclone]

Also that first Liefeld cover only looks good because McFarlane inked it. I'd forgotten just how horrible Liefeld's own lines could be...

Not only that, it's also partially swiped from a Gil Kane Avengers cover.

 

[Sweet Rabbit]

Liefeld sucks

 

[Surge Diaclone]

Geof Darrow



Simon Bisley

 

[Otomofan]

I know not who you are, but "Surge Diaclone" may be the best user name of all time.

I like Geof Darrow but I definitely think his stuff is too busy. I know that's his "thing" but sometimes too much is just too much.

Bisley, on the other hand, is a god. Or the dark beast. He's amazing.

I think his early stuff is best, while he still had some restraint to him. When he goes 100% Biz it can be kind of messy.

I know this isn't a cover, but this image from the first Batman/Judge Dredd is probably one of the best Batman drawings ever printed.

 

[Surge Diaclone]

Lol thanks!

Yeah, Bisley is definitely a god. His body of work from the late 80s to about the mid 90s was just untouchable...and it was all coming out one after another-even concurrently (I think he was doing the Doom Patrol covers the same time he was doing Slaine). I think after that his stuff started slowly regressing and got a little too idiosyncratic. But, no matter, I love his work and he's easily in my personal top 5.

 

[Surge Diaclone]

Michael Golden Conan



Glenn Fabry Ninja Turtles



Always liked this cover and remember as a kid being disappointed that the interior art didn't look like this. Also it's obvious the artist based this on Michelangelo's David..even kept the oversized head and hands.

 

[Surge Diaclone]

Katsuya Terada Iron Man


David Finch Ascension...funny thing about this cover, I believe it's the first time any of his painted work was published (wish he did more of it to be honest) and it looks like it was inspired by a paolo parente Conan cover that had come out the year before. Still tho, I actually like Finch's version better

 

[Surge Diaclone]

Glenn Fabry's cover for Showcase '93. Going with the black and white art cause the colored version that was published wasn't very good.

 

[karamazov80]

I remember that one well, from when it was first released. Not the most aesthetically pleasing piece, but very evocative. Great cover.

 

[Surge Diaclone]

Keith Giffen





Travis Charest

 

[Otomofan]

It's time for more classic comic covers!!

I just did a google search and grabbed some of the best of best. Most are from the 80s/90s. No particular order. A lot of them use inventive use of negative space and bold colors. I'm sure you'll recognize most, or all, of these. Apologies if they've already been posted. OK, enough chit chat, let's enjoy some of the best comic covers of the last few decades: