A Guest Post by Philipp Lenssen – http://www.coverbrowser.com/design
7 Designs From the World of Comic Books
Here are some interesting covers from the wild world of comic book art which may inspire design ideas!
This is a cover from the species “painted covers.” Far from being extinct, this species grows more and more popular on the US comic book market. Typically, the interior of the comic book will be drawn by someone else, and the cover is more lavish just to attract readers. This particular cover from the series Battle of the Planets is done by Alex Ross, who also created the poster to the 2002 Academy Awards ceremony. Alex Ross, who uses actors and photos to achieve some of his realistic work, is not loved by everyone; master storyteller & artist Alex Toth once called him an “idiot savant,” saying the art of those working too close from photographs is “lifeless.”
Batman: Black and White was an anthology showcasing different artists drawing short stories. The cover, by Alex Toth — who we got to meet above — is ultra simplistic. From an overflow of colors to shades of gray.
Many comic book heroes grow more mature over time. The cover designs often go along with them. Some people welcome these changes, while others believe that some of the silliness and fun that appeals to kids is lost. The above one is from a series called Decalogue which ran in the Daredevil books, written by none less than Kevin Smith of Clerks fame written by Brian Bendis.
This is one of the many covers of the series Tintin, hugely popular in Europe and other parts of the world. Artist Hergé from Belgium was a storyteller whose artwork was highly detailed but always serving to get the story across. His style is called ligne claire, or “clean line”, because there is not a lot of cross-hatching or other elements to add shade and volume to the pictures. But notice above how the characters are simple, but the background and scenery is far more detailed. Comic book scholar Scott McCloud in his groundbreaking analysis Understanding Comics argues that simpler character designs help the reader with identification; the complex background, on the other hand, represents the often dangerous and mystic outer world. Ever wondered why kids get so easily hypnotized by the TV when there’s a cartoon showing? This may be part of the reason.
This stylized action cover by Hiroaki Samura is from Blade of the Immortal. We roughly associate art work like this with the Japanese Manga style. But Manga art, while sharing common traits, comes in different flavors. One of these flavors is the so-called “superdeformed” style of drawings, with extra-cute characters having unproportionally large heads, with smaller bodies. What’s interesting to note is that while these figures may be more unrealistic by an objective definition, they may (as with ligne claire style, discussed above) help identification as they may be closer to the representation of “self” which the psyche creates: in our self-concept, we have a disproportionally stronger focus on the head, the hands, and the feet.
Artist Dave McKean, who illustrated the cover to The Dreaming as shown above, combines painted elements with photographs into dream-like collage works. He is often shown on covers of the Vertigo imprint of publisher DC (who otherwise also publishes more mainstream titles like Batman).
This comic book shipped in vastly oversized, thick paper format. Schizo by artist Ivan Brunetti is the half-joking, half-serious and always nihilist autobiographical account of a man fed up with live and his own unimportance. Every line of his retro, highly abstract drawings works as cartoon as well as ironic reflection on cartoons. Alternative publisher Fantagraphics, who has this title in their array, is the number one publisher if you want to not just entertain, but also enlighten yourself by digesting comic books.
To see all kinds of different covers, you can also visit http://www.CoverBrowser.com, where I’ve put up over 100,000 covers of all kinds so far. There’s everything from trash to pulp to cheesiness, from comic books to magazine and book covers, and hopefully there are a couple of inspirational gems for you as well!
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15 Comments
Hi Phillip,
Nice post on Comics cover designs. Probably one of the most overlooked subjects by the Design Gurus, LOL (you, know, they look down and say “Oh, it’s just comics!”
Just one thing: the Daredevil cover, drawn by Alex Maalev, doers indeed belong to the Decalogue story… but this story (and many others) was written by Brian Bendis, not film director Kevin Smith.
Smith only write an eight-issue story back in 1998, in which he killed, injured, maimed, humiliated and sank in misery most of the Daredevil cast of characters, LOL, then left to the poor writers following him to clear up all the mess (as in Reb Braddock’s film “Curdled”)
DD has got 481 issues in its first volume and bearly 100 in the current Vol.2
The blade of Immortal covers are certainly drawn in ‘manga style’. As each artist has his own handwriting it is logical that there are many different styles in which manga is expressed. Not all of them have the super-deformed action going on, but are closer to the realistic features.
Nice post.
(Thanks Gloria for the correction on Daredevil!)
Until Philipp wrote this post I hadn’t realise quite the diversity in comic book design. I love the retro Schizo, and “The Dreaming” which I also like is far from what I could imagine a comic book cover could look like.
batman has to be the best one there
Nice post, Phillip. It’s hard to go wrong with TinTin isn’t it? I love the look of the Daredevil cover too, really mean and moody.
As both a designer and former comic book fanatic, I thought this was a great piece with yet another unique way to examine design in our world. Great job!
All the styles that were showcased are very serious and matured. In contrast, I think artists like Jeff Matsuda and Ed McGuinness did great jobs at putting fun back into comic book art (in my time anyway) with their classic comicy/cartoonish styles. Life’s real enough, sometimes it’s good to escape it for a bit!
And when it comes to black and white cover art, I think Frank Miller (of Sin City fame) needs to definitely be mentioned.
I definitely love that daredevil cover, as well as the rest in the set of covers that had daredevil as a black silhouette with the ten commandments on them.
I even framed a few.
Nice post! Great to see TinTin between it. I am a huge fan of all the work of Hergé. I like the design of the Daredevil too, very nice color scheme!
About sometime we started paying tribute to the talent of comic book artists after years of Hollywood pillaging of their ideas and stylistic notions! You’ve got some excellent picks here.
I especially favor the work of Dave McKean and I dare say any of his covers for the Sandman series are worthy of display in a gallery. Now that I think of it didn’t they release a graphic novel format book of Sandman covers sometime after the series ended.
Of course I don’t see any Frank Miller up there…that’s OK – I suppose there’s too much to choose from.
Can anyone tell me where I could locate a good comic book character designer from please?
I have no idea where to look.
Regards,
John
Hi John, You could ask in design forums http://www.graphicdesignblog.co.uk/graphic-and-web-design-help-online/ or post a job to one of the freelance jobs boards
http://jobs.freelanceswitch.com/
http://freelancefolder.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=8
There’s this comic book store here in Elizabethtown that is so wonderful. They have such a wide variety of comics and I really enjoy going in there and checking out all the different comic book artwork with my daughters.
My favorite one from above is that Batman Black and White cover. Very striking w/o the use of any color. Amazing.
Corey Fischer – Owner & CTO
I’m a huge comics fan. I grew up buying and hoarding comics- but I seem to have never developed the skill for it. That’s one of my biggest frustrations. I like the Batman cover best.
The talents of Frank Miller definitely deserves a mention. Besides recent work on Sin City and 300, his stuff on Daredevil in the early 80′s was solid work.
Great selection you’ve got here!