House Of Mystery #211, DC, February 1973. Artist: Bernie Wrightson.
About 100 days ago I commented that we were heading into Cole Country (L.B. Cole). I didn’t want one artist to hijack the post so I excluded his covers for a bit just for variety sake. Luckily for all of us, the Covers project has morphed into multiple covers so I get to post each Frazetta cover somewhere in the post. Still, I’ve always planned to do the same for this Frazetta patch as I did to the Cole patch and go with 4 covers as the daily winners. I have 2 left.
Bernie Wrightson does great comic book covers, take a look at House of Mystery #211. I love the light through the trees effect.
While we’re on the Frazetta run we might as well add Ron Wagner’s nice homage to one of Frank’s seminal Conan paintings, the Frost Giants.
I dig the World’s Finest #211 by Neal Adams, you get the two big DC characters big and shiny twice on the cover and they are nicely rendered by Neal Adams and you get a jet black cover. And what on earth is going on? Batman flying? Superman not?
Frank Frazetta’s cover to Famous Funnies #211 is beyond classic but again for the sake of fairness I’m not giving him the whole run.
A great comic book cover matching each day of the year, 1 through 365. Please chime in with your favourite corresponding cover, from any era.
I didn’t pick the Wrightson because it looked to me like Wrightson trying to draw a Kane face.
The World’s Finest just doesn’t work for me as a cover. It strikes me more as a cover of one of the 1970s DC calendars.
An upward swing again for #212 and once again my apologies to Frank, because again it is not Famous Funnies. Rather it is Strange Adventures, with another Adams tour de force. Tarzan comes in second with another amazing Kubert cover. More kudos to Walt for this exercise, because otherwise I would not have been aware of Kubert’s amazing work on this run of early DC Tarzans. I will charitably pick Famous Funnies for third place with the comment that without the colors I would find this to be too visually confusing.
Some others I would like to note:
– Adventure might seem very standard, but spend some time studying the layout, the art, the storytelling, and I think you will start to see that it could be held up as “great”. For example look at the portrayal of the broken wrecking ball cable. Swan’s mastery is like almost too subtle flavors in fine food.
– X-Men: Legacy by Finch is about as good as a standing around cover can get.
– Daredevil and X-Men are also towards the top end of the standing around cover scale.
I keep looking to Blackhawk for another JOWA, but since they got their new uniforms they’ve turned over a new leaf. Nothing great but nothing absurd in the past few issues.
To clarify, that should read “Daredevil and _Uncanny_ X-Men”.
Not so much Wrightson trying to draw a Kane face as a Kane nose. LOL.
I’m now starting to look at Kane faces, I’m looking for something wrong but I don’t see anything wrong.