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.
Day 38 – Hedy of Hollywood #38, July 1950, Artist – Christopher Rule (comics.org has a ? beside artist).
It’s important to plan ahead.
What a great “twist” on a genre that we see all too often with innuendo. Love it.
Um, no.
There are so many reasons that this doesn’t belong here:
– Most importantly this is a “newspaper/magazine cartoon”-type cover that is effectively just a transfer of such a cartoon onto a comic cover. Most Archies through the Bronze Age are in this category. There is some very slight chance that such a cover could be “great” if the art is extraordinary/distinctive and highly evocative, but otherwise there are many many such covers which are very similar from a “great cover” perspective. The closely related category is “amusing cartoon” where there isn’t so much a joke (which usually requires balloons) as a funny/somewhat surprising situation depicted. I put most funny animals, silver/bronze Harveys, etc. into this category. Similar considerations about “great cover” apply. Probably the majority of comic book covers is in these categories, and almost none of these qualifies as a “great cover” from my perspective.
– The cover situation or joke needs to be distinguished from the execution. Even if the joke is very funny (many New Yorker cartoon jokes are very funny), this doesn’t have much bearing on a great _cover_. That is going to be determined by the quality and evocativeness of the artwork. In this case I am only going to give kudos to the expression on the guy’s face – otherwise pretty generic.
– And the joke isn’t that funny, so even much improved art wouldn’t save this.
The most likely place to find a “great cover” of this sort in my opinion is in some of the busy funny animal covers from the late thirties/early forties. There are also some Archies where the art fundamentally improves the impact of the situation or joke. But I think this is like finding a needle in a haystack, so I am generally not even bothering to review these kinds of covers.
I really can’t imagine picking this over the classic Superman #38 or the utterly over-the-top Thrilling #38. I realize that you are trying for variety, but replacing a Neal Adams with a Mike Grell for the sake of variety can’t be condoned.
I am now up to #41 in my picks. Just to spite you I am going to throw in a parallel to the pick above to show when such covers can legitimately be considered as “great”.
Action (my top choice)
Archie’s Girls Betty and Veronica
Green Lantern Corps
Marvel Mystery
Thrilling
Don’t worry dear Hedy, I’ll defend your honor. The Thrilling was great but I’ve been going to the “let’s figure out the weirdest way to put a damsel in distress” well a little too many times and with another one on the near horizon I abstained. Sup 38 does nothing for me. My second pick was actually Fight Comics #38, love the clean lines of the cover and love even more the classic rescue scene. The Hedy pick was topical I thought, something laughed at in the past but so on point today and for me the sight gag worked. I’d love to own this cover.
To my chagrin I realized that Superman #38 pretty much falls into the “amusing cartoon” category. But I did leave the door open for a select few of these qualifying as “great covers”. As Burt Reynolds on Celebrity Jeopardy might have said, “Superman’s getting a haircut. It’s funny. Sure it is. It’s funny because the scissors can’t cut his hair.”
On to my #42 picks. Now that I’m using GCD a new world has opened, and that combined with weak GA #42s has led me to an eclectic group:
Deadpool (2013 series)
Green Lantern
JLA (1997 series)
New Warriors
Teen Titans (first series)
Both recent Aquaman #42 covers are awesome but more as art than as “great covers”. Also Rex the Wonder Dog comes through with an amazing scenario.
Was there ever a Rex/Jimmy Olsen crossover?
I think WOW 38 would have been a better choice here if you didn’t want to go with Exciting 38. It’s such a wonderful looking Mary Marvel cover.