Vision On

As I discovered earlier, Wizard magazine have an online feature where their staff pick the top 100 comics covers of all time. Unfortunately, the majority of their picks are not very good. So here are ten covers that are good.

ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN #2 by Bill Sienkiewicz
I loooove prime Sienkiewicz, from when his pages were made up of watercolour paintings, blurry Xeroxed photographs, childrens drawings, paperclips and God knows what else. And I loooove Garrett, ugly eighties action man in a bad wig. So I loooove this cover.

FANTASTIC FOUR #82 by Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott
Probably the most sedate cover Kirby ever drew, but it's a great teaser for the story and any Kirby/Sinnott drawing of the Thing is a good drawing, I say.

MAZE AGENCY #7 by Adam Hughes and Rick Magyar
Noir. Pretty girls. Espionage. This cover basically presses all my buttons at once.

CEREBUS #80 by Dave Sim and Gerhard
Ah, the dependable old "winding up for a punch" cover. The fact that in this case the punch is going to be thrown by a giant rock-man dressed in Papal robes doesn't really count against it, either.

JUSTICE LEAGUE AMERICA #41 by Adam Hughes
Second Adam Hughes contribution. Dialogue balloons on comics covers: generally a bit cheesy. But absolutely everyone who sees this wants to be as unflappable as Maxwell Lord, so we'll make an exception just this once.

OUR ARMY AT WAR #209 by Joe Kubert
Okay, just this twice. But yeah, admit it. You want to know what happens next.

ASTRO CITY #13 by Alex Ross
Seriously, just take a couple of minutes and look at this painting. Look at all the things it's doing at once. It manages to convey a fairly unusual situation at a glance. And it's a stylish composition. And it's funny. And it has a cartoon lion dressed like Bogart in CASABLANCA.

DAREDEVIL #229 by David Mazzucchelli
I think what appeals to me most about this cover is that it's a picture of a crazy homeless guy taking on a knife-wielding Santa Claus in a snowstorm.

X-MEN #186 by Paul Smith
Kitty Pride: Alone! I say this is the cover which gave birth to Joss Whedon's comics-writing career. It's also just a beautiful composition, in that way that makes small children and consumptives stir in their sleep and cry out "Paul Smith is a God!" at random intervals.

USAGI YOJIMBO #2 by Stan Sakai
It's the single raised eyebrow that makes this one for me.

Johnny Craig is one of the great lost talents of comics. Frank Miller (SIN CITY, 300), possibly the most well-known graphic novelist alive today, credits Craig as a prime influence — "I’ve really studied Johnny Craig, and bought some of his originals and studied them. too. He just takes me to school every time I look at him... A lot of people who think Sin City is shocking and new should really study Johnny Craig..."

Craig was a visual storyteller of tremendous skill. He had a knack for drawing a shocking scene and underplaying it in a way that gave it all the more impact. One of his short stories for EC, "When The Cat's Away," depicts a man pushing a woman backwards off her feet by her face. It's shown in no-frills medium shot, but it's still one of the most brutal things ever seen in comics.

Craig did most of his memorable work in the EC comics of the 1950s, drawing short crime stories and working on their horror books — they of the ghoulish horror hosts, the Tales From The Crypt, etc. Those comics had their melodramatic elements, as you can see in the artwork below.

Those heavy blacks, the eerie lighting, that staccatto storytelling style — the above sequence is a wonderful encapsulation of the feel of the EC horror comics. The only problem is, the art isn't taken from an EC book, or a horror comic of any kind. It comes from an issue of the Marvel superhero comic IRON MAN, which Craig worked on briefly in the 1960s. According to comics historian Mark Evanier, editor Stan Lee felt that Craig's style didn't fit in at Marvel, and Craig had difficulty making the deadlines on a monthly book.

That goes a long way towards explaining why Craig isn't as greatly-honoured today as he rightly should be. He had difficulty fitting into the superhero-dominated comics industry that resulted after Estes Kefauver's Senate committee brought the EC horror line down in 1954, and the slow pace at which he produced work meant that he basically faded from view when his tenure on IRON MAN was over.

Stan may not have liked it, but some of Craig's Marvel work is excellent. Check out this awesome splash image, mistakenly attributed to "Johhny Craig".

And look at this. Shock lines with shadows!

Indie cartoonist Seth (IT'S A GOOD LIFE IF YOU DON'T WEAKEN, WIMBLEDON GREEN) once remarked that he found it difficult to draw violence in his comics without it looking like "comic book violence" — more redolent of a Jack Kirby drawing of a punch than of the real thing. It's true that Kirby-style fight staging has had an inordinate influence in North American comics — characters throwing brute-force haymakers, bodies flying across the room. Craig had a different approach:

And here's a nice last example: writer Archie Goodwin and Craig show a character slowly regaining consciousness within the space of a single panel.

Craig's EC material is by far his most influential and well-remembered, but he was still bringing new things to the table with the largely-forgotten work he did later at Marvel. It's minor work, sure, but minor work from one of the all-time greats.