Eye-Popping Blog Remixes Memorable Comic Book Covers
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By Scott Thill
- September 8, 2009 |
- 7:34 pm |
- Categories: Books and Comics
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Classic comic book covers get reinterpreted by modern artists on Covered, a fascinating blog that puts a graphic spin on a musical tradition.
“It’s like a jazz musician playing a standard,” said Robert Goodin, 38, the illustrator and lifelong comics fan who runs the site. “We get to come in and make something our own that we don’t have to build from scratch. It’s nice to do something where many of the decisions have already been made by somebody else and the artist is free to riff on it.”
Goodin, who lives in Hollywood and works on the American Dad television show, launched Covered in January. He receives between five and 15 submissions a week, so they can’t all be the comic book equivalent of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.”
Curating the collection, which includes fairly straightforward revisions as well as bizarre interpretations that take the original artwork in cool new directions, takes real effort, Goodin told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “The least enjoyable part of doing this is rejecting covers sent to me,” he said. “But I think the best use the original as a starting point and then take it somewhere unexpected.”
Read on for Goodin’s take on 10 of his favorite submissions to Covered.
Above:
Adventures of Superman No. 438, covered by Eric Skillman
“Since the age of computer coloring came into mainstream superhero comics in the ’90s,” Goodin said, “colorists have gone haywire with their almost infinite tools. They often will use too many colors, gradients, solar flares and any other Photoshop trick they can find, so the results are often murky messes that are impossible to make out from more than two feet away.
“But Eric is a graphic designer and responsible for many of the great DVD covers of the Criterion Collection. He understands the power of a limited palette and has an understanding that one of the first priorities of a good cover is for it to be clear (unless of course, you don’t want it to be). Everything about this cover screams pain, from Superman’s expression, which was equally captured in the original, to the hot color palette, to the expressionistic line. Superman looks like he is burning in a star; the image screams at you from across the room in more ways than one.”
Images courtesy Covered
