Ask ME: About Covers

Chris Powe writes…

I briefly accumulated comics, including recent back issues I ran across at a cool general store in Wichita Falls, back in the early 60s. I read my DC favorites from cover to cover. DC used to send original art to their letter writers that were published. Do you remember that? Another thing I seem to recall reading is that sometimes a cover would be drawn and then a story written for it. That seemed reasonable at the time to fourteen year old me, but now…

Yep, some editors at DC used to mail original art to readers who had letters printed in their comics…and wasn't just those editors who announced on the pages that they were doing this. I had a couple of letters published in The Inferior Five, which was edited by Jack Miller and he sent me a couple of original pages from that comic without announcing it.

One was from the second Showcase issue of that property in which the art was credited to Joe Orlando and Mike Esposito. I had that page on the wall of my bedroom for about a year until one day I looked at it and realized it wasn't drawn by Joe Orlando. All or most of it was ghost-penciled by Jerry Grandenetti. Grandenetti ghosted a lot of work at DC, Western and Warren that was credited to Orlando.

Click above to view these larger.

And I didn't have any letters published in Strange Adventures when it was featuring Deadman drawn by Neal Adams but Mr. Miller, shortly before he left DC, sent me a couple of those pages as a thank-you for a short correspondence we had and to apologize that he wouldn't be able to give me a script assignment he said he was going to give me.

And yes, covers were sometimes drawn before there was a script. Before the advent of the Direct Sales Market, there was a stronger belief — very strong with some editors and publishers — that the cover of a comic was the single-most important selling tool. They believed almost all readers were casual readers, not collectors. They felt most folks who bought comics bought them as an impulse buy. They'd look at the rack and purchase whatever looked interesting, often because of the situation depicted.

Then click above to view these larger.

Many an editor, after struggling to find a great cover scene in a story that was already written and maybe already drawn, decided it might be easier to do it the other way around: Design what seemed to be a "grabber" of a cover and then have a writer write a story to go with it. Often, the person in charge had some idea that certain elements on a cover — like gorillas or fire or the Earth blowing up — boosted sales. It was easier to get one or more of those elements on a cover if you started there.

Sometimes also, the needs of the engravers and printers necessitated the cover going to press way before the insides. (Some folks seem to believe that was always the case. Not so. Just sometimes.) And there was a period at Marvel when getting Jack Kirby to draw a cover before the insides of the comic were written or drawn was a way to get him to design a new character or come up with a plot idea. There were lots of reasons. I've illustrated this answer with the covers of some comics that were known to have been drawn before the story was written…but it didn't happen all the time.