Thinking about the comic book market. (Not the “comic book” market.)
54 Comments | Posted: December 11th, 2008 | Filed under: Thinking about Comics Marketing | Tags: designThe other day, Bully pointed me towards a fun-looking book design challenge over on Typophile. There’s some really nice work there using a simple set of basics: take the title of a random Wikipedia article, go to the Life archives on Google and use that article title as a search term, and go to town. While some people seem to have never actually seen a book in their lives, others came up with “covers” that made me stop and think about reaching for my wallet. (The Bordeaux Wine Regions one is just perfect, as is the “book” featuring Haydn’s Symphony No. 79.)
This, of course, got me to thinking about how comics, particularly the ones coming from DC and Marvel, compare in design to what’s on the book market lately and what I would do to sell graphic novels and trade paperback collections alongside Twilight and whatever adventure Tom Clancy’s Op Center has found themselves on this time. A lot of the design concerns of comics that come from their days as newsstand periodicals (logo on top) and the direct market reaction to those (tiered displays that only show the top 25-30% of a book) disappear in the book market, where tables and full-flush displays give people a view of the whole cover.
It goes without saying (but I suppose I should say it anyway) that I didn’t create these to slight the original artists who worked on any of these series at all, but to work on these purely as marketing and design exercises and think of how comics are presented to the world outside of the direct market. There are quite a few companies (Top Shelf, Fantagraphics,) creators (Bryan Lee O’Malley, Chris Ware,) and designers (Ch*p K*dd that create books that look terrific when they’re in the wild, but I think a lot of the comic book design mentality revolves around a culture that already exists, particularly in the case of Marvel and DC’s superhero lines.
One of the things that comes up when I’m throwing the design football back and forth with Birdie is that Daredevil books rarely look as good and noiry as they should. The recent paperback reprints of Miller’s run on the title feature near-identical covers and blur together while the Omnibus editions are attractive, but priced far out of the reach of the casual buyer. (Also: as far as I can tell, The Man Without Fear is currently out of print. Why would you want a book by Frank Miller to be available with his directorial debut hitting theaters soon, anyway? Toby in the comments points out that a new edition hit comic shops yesterday, but it’s not on Amazon yet. Heh.)
With this cover, I opted for a photograph of New York City during a blackout (obtained through the Life online archives.) It’s an evocative image that represents the blind vigilante: the city, dark except for a single shining building in the foreground with a river of light in front of it. The blurring on the title is a fairly-obvious pun, but it looked too nice to resist. I played around with the text’s placement for quite some time before opting for a forced perspective that called back to my favorite logo for the original series.
Speaking of fairly obvious, I’ve made it easy to deduce that Whiteout is about a murder in a place where there’s a lot of snow. (This time, it’s Antarctica.) This one’s more rough concept than actual cover, because given the chance, I’d probably attempt to create this photographically with snow and fake (or real, if I had an intern handy) blood. One of the posters for the upcoming film version uses a similar idea, and I know I got the blood splatter’s angle from Watchmen without even looking. If you’re going to steal, there are many, many worse people to swipe from than Dave Gibbons.
Honestly, this was mostly a reaction to how ugly I thought the recent direct market edition of Welcome Back Frank was. Three different fonts, two different versions of the skull icon, and the book’s title was buried at the bottom? What a mess. Ideally, this would be printed with a flat matte black-and-grey background with the type featuring a nice coating, helping sell the whole “handbook” look and feel a bit more.
(It’d be a fun challenge to design a whole Punisher Max series using a similar motif, with cover elements that relate to the story. While I may avoid Twilight and its brethren like the plague, I think the covers do a nice job of being different from one another while providing a unified look for the series.)
So blatant. I should be embarrassed, but I’m not, mostly because I think the original photo is quite nice on its own, plus that font does a lot of heavy lifting. I was initially looking for images that features a single man in a crowd or sea of women, but I like this because it represents a quiet moment away from the maddening life he’d soon find himself on. The only changes I’d make is to add a monkey if I were going to commission a photo that did the same thing.
While it’s unlikely that something like The Sinestro Corps War or New Avengers could sell to a much larger market, standalone books or series that require very little knowledge in the way of continuity outside of the titles themselves could show elevated sales if they didn’t look so offputting to a lot of people. Marvel and DC have crafted brands that work terrifically in the direct market, but in the book world, content comes before publisher, and that’s how I approached this project.
That Y The Last Man one is tremendous.
I’d buy ‘em. Which is, in itself, a huge positive in book design.
I would LOVE to see these on the shelves. Daredevil and Y work particularly well, I reckon – and you’re not wrong about that Punisher cover. Cripes. I dunno. Is it too obvious to say that there’s a lot of “fuck it, that’ll do” thinking in the world of comics publishing?
Damn Kev, these are gorgeous. The Daredevil one is my favorite, thought I love the mid-life crisis-y feel for the Y but damn. DAMN. I really need the Daredevil one on my wall, like, yesterday.
Mr. Church, these are absolutely fantastic. you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but there’s no reason that cover shouldn’t be appealing and eye catching to get you to read it in the first place.
Another thing: I’m a librarian/archivist, but I’m also a sucker for good design and aesthetics… So i feel conflicted when I want to exhibit as much of my books as possible, but I have a lot of (frankly) ugly comic book trades to put on the shelf. This would certainly solve that problem.
My favorite is the Y cover, but the Daredevil one is pretty stylish too.
You’d think that after Penguin snagged comic book artists to make covers for their books that were more grabbing/appealing that the comic book industry could catch on and do something similar.
Hi Kevin,
Marvel apparently released The Man Without Fear yesterday (direct market) in HC. Two different covers show on Marvel.com — both of which are inferior to your design.
Cheers,
Toby
Too, too many collected editions feature a cover that was part of the regular run, indicating that you’re probably very much onto something.
And Toby was right, and I’ve corrected the post. Thanks!
As a graphic designer and a comic book fan, I totally agree. The big two are very stale when it comes to the design of their books. And I’m not just talking about their trades, the interior/exterior of their monthlies are just as bad. Marvel still insists on using Crackhouse on a lot of their books and house ads (the font that “Welcome Back, Frank” is set in on the book you linked to). What is this, 1996? It is one of the most overused fonts of all and it drives me up a wall every time I see it.
I thought one of the biggest eyesores from the last couple of years was the design for the Civil War books. The way they handled the typography in the series was just terrible. If that was in my portfolio, I’d be embarrassed. Every time I’m digging through one of my long boxes and I flash by a Civil War book, I cringe.
I personally think that Dark Horse is doing some pretty awesome things with the design of their books as well as their house ads. I stumbled across an article on Apple’s site about how they’ve been handling their production on computers in-house since 1989. They have a full production and design department, and when you open one of their books, it really shows. Their books are really well designed and there’s an attention to detail that the big two seem to lack.
That Whiteout cover is great, though I don’t think I’d mind seeing the blood spatter continue onto the text, rather than under it. I’m imagining it as a dull matte slip-cover, with the text being defined solely by embossing rather than any printing. That would be fancy.
I played with the splatter going over the letters, but they lost some definition that way. Also, ideally, it would be embossed because fuck yeah, EMBOSSING.
Hmm, I dunno. I agree that a lot of the Big Two’s TPBs are butt-ugly, and something should be done about it, but these sample covers are, I feel, inappropriate for comic books. They’re too divorced from its contents — too “booky”.
(I realize this post is about making comics appealing to the book market, but bear with me).
I think a successful cover, apart from looking pretty, should effectively convey its contents. These sample images might work as book covers, where a single image can capture the tone of an otherwise picture-less work, but as comic covers? Works containing picture after picture of an illustrator’s drawings? I’m afraid that would be a misrepresentation far worse than, say, an Ian Churchill-drawn comic with an Adam Hughes cover.
I know that Chip Kidd’s name is mud in the comics world these days thanks to the whole “Bat-Manga” brou-ha-ha, but Marvel and DC could do a lot worse than to study his cover designs – they’re almost always elegant, interesting and give you some idea of what to expect from the book without being too obvious.
I think you’ve really hit on something here, Kevin – if Marvel and DC want their product to be taken seriously like “real” books, they could do a lot worse than start by making them look like “real” books.
Except in this case, someone can open the book, look inside, and see what the interior looks like, if the trim size and back cover (which, to be fair, I didn’t mock up) don’t indicate that this is a comic book strongly enough. At least using a design or typographical solution doesn’t switch artists as in your example and would be more “honest.”
Also: not all artists are designers and vice versa.
My googling isn’t turning anything up — can somebody give me the gist of the brouhaha referred to here?
I like these as book covers, that is as “trades” in the true (publishing) sense of the term. I also agree whole-heartedly that most TPB/GN/Comic covers are eye-sores. That said, I think that some of the appeal of comics lies in their status as “not-books,” as art objects of a sort. So in some senses it might be better to indulge in some measured idiosyncrasy.
Nevermind, I added “controversy” to my search, that did the trick.
Kidd’s work on Final Crisis has been really interesting for me to pick at and absorb, even if I have some issues with the subsidiary titles also having the exact same branding without a clear distinction (through colors, I’d think). The “Bar” covers are nice, but I think it really jumps when it’s the character-focused covers with the great Jones body shots and the typography being a part of the shot in a “floating in the air beside them” sense.
the daredevil one: WOW.
I think an example of really great trade-dress in mainstream comics are the two die-cut cover designs used for Darwyn Cooke’s Spirit hardcovers. There’s an example of the first here, and the second was even better.
Of course, you’d expect a higher degree of quality from a Darwyn Cooke book than, say, the eighteenth secret Invasion tie-in miniseries or something.
Pretty much everything relating to Cooke’s career at DC has had a really nice design. He, Sean Phillips, and Brian Wood are creating the most compelling cover designs right now for the big two. (Phillips, man, I could go on for days talking about how great his art works with typography. Just look at that Blast Of Silence cover he did for Criterion. Those mammoth blacks that could swallow up the world are perfect for covers like that.)
I guess my question is… Who is the intended target of these covers?
If the target audience is comic readers, and the idea is simply for comics to ‘fit in’ in bookstores, then I think these are okay (frankly, I was disappointed the Daredevil cover wasn’t real).
But if the intended target are book readers, would it be too much of a disconnect between exterior and interior artwork? I mean, your Daredevil cover looks nice, but that’s quite a leap, going from that to John Romita Jr.-illustrated comics.
(Chris Weston’s pencils and Carlos Segura’s covers for The Filth would be another example.)
My God, but that Daredevil one is stunning, Kevin.
Both of the examples you gave would apply. Comics readers buy things because they’ve gotten some buzz or they’ve had it recommended to them. If they pick up a comic and the interior art is different than the exterior, they don’t sweat it, it’s part of the culture they’re a part of. Book readers are also used to a different view than the cover provides. Watchmen had covers that were based on graphic design. The Filth was, too, and I don’t think anyone went “Oh hey, this is a graphic design cover and the interior features art by Chris Weston!”
I don’t think that moving from photography and type to illustrations is the jump you seem to think it is. Look at the mentioned example of Brian Wood and his series DMZ: his covers featured treated photographs, are loaded with grungy, itchy designs, and bear only a superficial resemblance to the interior art in the palette used. It’s a significant seller in the book and comics market.
These are some seriously minimalist, stripped-down designs. I’m kind of curious, in a general sense, what is it that draws you to such a bare approach to design? It was kind of startling when you posted that comics shop sale poster; the thick borders on the type and the multiple fonts gave it a much busier look than a lot of the other work you’ve posted.
I didn’t chime in soon enough for any original comments. Nice job, good points, well said.
Remember the days where they would at least commission brand new covers by the interior artists for the collected edition? Now they just recycle some random pin-up style cover that’s already been used on one of the issues that’s been collected. It’s all become too lackluster and cookie-cutter.
I don’t always enjoy Chip Kidd’s choices, but he does make a book stand out amidst the rest of the stuff.
If I’m given my druthers, I’ll relay very precise, very minimal information to a viewer. I like to let people form their own impressions and create an image in their own head. The “Henchmen” flyers I did relayed that pretty well, I think, and apparently got some attention because they stood out against other, more complicated posters created for similar events. I believe in trusting the audience to “get it.” Sometimes, you get requests for more type, more details, etc on a design and you give in. With the Comicazi Con flyer, I wanted a strong, central holiday image that people could pretty much deduce under the type that I was informed had to be there, the inverse of what I did elsewhere. There’s a holiday icon people understand and “get” immediately that I wouldn’t feel was being buried by text, so I went with that.
I know nothing about design, really, but I can think of some trade (cover) designs that I think are really good.
Tony Harris on Ex Machina has covers which I always think are great. You could argue that they’re a little busy, but I think it works. I’d never realised until now how rarely it seems Marvel and DC commission new covers for their trades.
Image have some strong ones – Nightly News, which was as much a design project as comic, struck unsurprisingly me as one of the best designed trades I’ve seen. I like the Phonogram trade cover, but can’t help thinking that with something like Phonogram, Nightly News, Ex Machina (or totally different, like Kingdom Come) where the artist is distinctive and a selling point, displaying work from the artist on the cover is probably a good thing.
Though Jamie McKelvie, Jonathan Hickman, Tony Harris and Alex Ross are all artists who I think have excellent design sense. I wouldn’t have thought it of Ross, but the series on Todd Klein’s blog about collaborating really highlit that aspect.
These designs are good, but I can’t help thinking that they’re not necessarily doing the best job selling the book. And I can’t help thinking that I’d really like to see a JHWilliams III or Chris Bachalo designed trade paperback.
Oh, and I’m not sure I’d agree with you on Fantagraphics. Maybe I’m just being picky, but I really don’t find that Love & Rockets’s recent digests were particularly attractive.
That Daredevil cover is BOSS, man. I would buy that in a heartbeat.
I dunno, Kevin. They could use a bit more metallic ink, and maybe a hologram or two.
HAW!
But seriously, these are beautifully done, and could compete in any bookstore or media outlet. I must say that I fell completely in love with the Daredevil cover, but they are ALL good.
That Daredevil cover wouldn’t look out of place next to some of my Walter Mosley paperbacks. If, y’know, you could see the covers when they’re spine out on a bookshelf.
I think the design work on some books – like the Titan 2000AD collections, those little Sin City books, and the Love & Rockets collections I’m seeing on the shelf at the moment – are really nice, but you’re right that generally comic publishers are stuck in a very lazy mode at the moment.
Interestingly, the first thing I thought when I saw your Whiteout cover was that it reminded me a lot of the Matt Wagner cover to the first issue. A search at ComicBookDB told me that I was kind of wrong, but kind of right – I think Wagner was going for a similar starkness but was stuck with a bluish tinge, and the composition is oddly similar.
Personally, I prefer the lost little body to the blood splash, but a photo-image would work better on a book than the Wagner illustration, I think. I much prefer your typeface.
I’m recalling something almost exactly like the “Whiteout” cover from the glorious ‘Nineties. Pretty sure it was die-cut, with raised letters and bloodstain…. This ring any bells for anybody else?
Maybe I’ve grown too cynical, but that Daredevil cover just looks like a generic mix of JJ Abrams and Sin City/Spirit titles. I appreciate it and think its fun to look at, but doesn’t strike me as what could be a unique mix of comic book aesthic with front table B&N appeal. I like the ‘blurriness’ idea you were playing with and the bright building/river brought to mind DD’s sonar powers. Maybe that’s the way in – design the covers from the ‘book’ side of things and then add in that ‘comic’ twist which the general public might not get outright (but which won’t significantly change the cover), but which a dedicated fan will spot right off an appreciate.
This was a fantastic post. That Daredevil one is quite hypnotic.
But, disagreeing with a comment above, I think there are some floppy covers that fit for the trade. Things like these (http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51-9S2bqhtL._SS500_.jpg) are just too fit for a cover in how the composition strikes strongly like a central pillar while a delicate center is covered, in the atmosphere it creates, colours, light, thematic and plot compression of what’s inside, how the tiny earth seems to delicately move towards us in 3D as if it’s being given to us in titanic protection while he gives birth to it Vishnu-style (one of the 12 “labors”), how it translate the character’s appeal into a new shining attractive pull etc (even if they manage to somewhat break a bit the serene Baraka-like delicate cosmic awe/grandness with the letters and the blue bar and other assimetrycal pollutions).
So it doesn’t seem to me to be a matter of just picking any cover. But not even willing to work with the cover they’re given as much as they could.
And damn, I’d forgotten how awesome all Filth’s covers were…
Thanks for your input, “Kalyarn.”
I think we all agree that just about any Frank Quitely cover can be used as prints, posters, dust jackets, tattoos, covers for completely unrelated books, etc, etc, etc Zack.
Is it me, or does the All-Star Superman cover shout ‘benign dictator’ to anyone else? Beautiful, yes, but creepy.
I loved your Daredevil cover, but I think it might fit Frank Miller’s earlier self-drawn stories more than the ‘Man Without Fear’ mini.
Yeah, you leave the sphere of myths and you get Chaplin pissing on Hitler…
I like that you’re thinking about alternative cover styles, and I agree with you that comic covers these days are pretty cookie-cutter, but these are too conceptual.
You’re working with a code of images and contexts that are familiar to only you and the Daredevil audience. Did you not mention that you’re trying to reach an audience of new readers?
People aren’t necessarily going to infer Daredevil or even comic book just by looking at this and reading the title.
So what’s the problem with that? Well…
Think of Tom Clancy’s novels. His novel covers are cheap and unengaging. The reason people are buying them like hotcakes is because it says TOM CLANCY in the middle of the cover.
So then it should work if DAREDEVIL is treated the same way because it’s Daredevil that sells.
No.
Comics are VISUAL.
Why detract from that aspect?
How many text-only movie covers are out there that work?
It works for books because books are nothing but text. Comics are completely different animals, are they not?
It’s almost like you’re downplaying the legitimacy of comics in comparison to novels.
I’m trying to see how using an image of New York plunged into darkness, a visual reference to murder on the ice, character iconography, and a picture of a man alone don’t visually refect the material inside. Graphics are visuals and can enhance the material inside in their own way. Covers that don’t resemble the interiors are, again, nothing new: Sandman’s trade paperback covers look nothing like the interior: they’re pieces of art on their own, and people here have already mentioned The Filth and Jonathan Hickman’s work, as well as Brian Wood’s superlative DMZ efforts, and I’ll reiterate that the majority of the bookstore audience is not the deeply invested in the sequential artists inside: they want the characters, they want a visual hook. The interior artists (god bless them) have to tell the story. The cover has to sell the story, or at least engage someone and make them pick up the book.
Excellent ideas! These are fantastically unique, and make me wish they existed so that I could read comics on the bus without people giving me the eye all the time.
The Daredevil cover, as others have said, is wonderful, but it immediately reminded me of the cover to Bob Dylan’s newest album, “Modern Times.” I prefer your cover, actually, but the similarity is striking. Coincidence or inspiration?
Coincidence. I didn’t even know Bob Dylan had an album out called that! Looking at it, I can see the similarities. If I weren’t on my phone (drunk-ish in the back of a cab,) I’d link the Jaime Hernandez poster done for his radio show.
I really, really like the design for The Man Without Fear. Makes me think of Taxi Driver, sort of (the neon, the city). That and the credit sequence for David Fincher’s Panic Room, which was one of my favorite credit sequences ever.
I like these, but why make the Daredevil and Y covers photographs? Artists can draw a city skyline, they can draw a man standing on a beach…
Any chance you could do a full design of the “Daredevil” jacket, so I can print it out and slip it over the publisher’s jacket? (Although, the original jacket from 1993 isn’t bad with the radar Daredevil head, and the new variant, with the diagonal design, is nice to look at.)
I agree with the praise for the Daredevil design. Kudos. However, the Punisher cover is pretty amateur level stuff. People need to realize that just because Portagol is a ‘stencil’ typeface, it doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for a military look (main offender recently being the Millar/Harris War Heroes). Comic Sans, Papyrus and Portagol are the cringe-inducing type trifecta. Leave the pre-loaded fonts alone and source your type properly.
Having designed and marketed DVD key art for years, I always thought it would have been prudent to give trades a new look. The only one out of the bunch here that I don’t immediately respond to is THE PUNISHER.
The black background, grey midtone and white foreground title treatment is too narrow a contrast range. Might be nice to throw either the title treatment or the skull image to the red end of the spectrum to see what happens.
Well done sire!
Thanks for your input. It was the only (of many) Stencil fonts I had that I felt was appropriate, and the letter width (with some tweaking to the spacing) fit my design well. I always considered “Trajan” the other part of the “cringe-inducing type trifecta” anyway.
BTW, do you do design? Do you have a portfolio? I’d love to see your work.
I played with that and maybe it was just having done the Daredevil and Whiteout designs, but it felt sort of tired immediately. I preferred keeping it sort of minimal and flat and think it’d stand out on the rack just through its contrast with other things. Maybe. I’d hope.
These are great, Kevin. Thanks for a feast for the eyes, which I have passed on to my design-minded friends. Oh, and:
“I agree with the praise for the Daredevil design. Kudos. However, the Punisher cover is pretty amateur level stuff. People need to realize that just because Portagol is a ‘stencil’ typeface, it doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for a military look (main offender recently being the Millar/Harris War Heroes). Comic Sans, Papyrus and Portagol are the cringe-inducing type trifecta. Leave the pre-loaded fonts alone and source your type properly.”
Bro . . . don’t be a dick.
I like the layout and concepts, but I would take the the photographs to the next level and retain some level of graphic rather than photographic. Take of the bevel on the blood. Flat red splatter will do. Change the bevel on the white text to a hard-edge black shadow, as though it were inked. For the Daredevil cover, I’d up the contrast on that photo to make it look as though it were a pen and ink illustration or a close-up of a halftone newspaper-printed photograph.
Love how you laid out the text on the last one.
Since that the photo is from the Life archives, I decided to leave it as close to its original form as possible. I see what you mean, though, and could probably do a halftone pass if I had a large-enough source file.