Capullo’s cover for Batman #18 is a stark reminder of recent events in the Bat-Family. The image is high-contrast, simply and sharply inked, with a pretty basic colour scheme: red and green, the long-standing colours of one of comics’ most beloved sidekicks. By comparison, the bird in the image has been coloured in a more painterly style, with blended colours and a softer line qualityThe boots being drawn empty and untied lends a sense of abandonment to the image, and the bird that has claimed them as its perch is another signifier, akin to birds occupying old ruins. There has been death here. But it’s a robin, and while we see that immediately as a reference to the chosen name of the deceased, perhaps it is a sign of things to come. Robins are a sign of spring, of hope, and of new life. There may be more to this cover than initially captures our attention.
Rathburn’s art on the front of The Walking Dead #108 does the chosen imagery justice…except for the tiger. The feline appears washed out, an attempt at atmospheric perspective that falls short (also, the animal isn’t far enough to warrant that stylization. It could be that the tiger is supposed to be a representation of the character’s spirit, and appear ethereal, but this is not well communicated if it is the case). The posture and rendering of the figure is exquisite though, weighted well and posed in a way that seems relatively natural. All in all an excellent cover, save for the tiger, which I feel detracts from the image as a whole.
Jae Lee’s Ozymandias #6 cover is interesting. We saw Capullo’s cover present a subtle difference in style between the sharply inked boots and the more painterly bird; this cover is just plain inconsistent, though I suspect blame for that falls on the colorist. The pencil and ink work is gorgeous; the octopus is drawn flawlessly, with some truly beautiful stylization in the most silhouetted areas, and placing the whole thing on a stark white background heightens this. And there is nothing wrong with the colour scheme; the purple/gold and red/green combinations are basic colour theory, complementary hues. What destroys it is the textural inconsistency. The character of Ozymandias is cell-shaded with minimal gradient (a call back, perhaps, to Gibbons’ work on the original comics), but the octopus has been rendered in an extremely high-texture, painterly fashion. The image lacks unity, and that is its stumbling point.
The pulp reference in the cover for The Black Beetle #1 is really great. Francavilla’s use of the three-colour composition used in old screenprint processes adds a lot of punch to the cover. It’s highly stylized, simple, and bold, all of which compound into a classic look that was clearly the objective here. I will pick on one pet peeve of mine; artists who don’t understand the mechanics of weaponry. I don’t know what’s going on with the slide on the gun in his right hand, but it’s not functional. Aside from that, I have no complaints. Really a very well-constructed cover.
The cover for Fever Ridge is, as Sara said, “really beautiful stuff”. It’s a barebones colour scheme of washed-out olive drab and red-orange of varying intensities, and that’s it. The painterly attention to texture application is impressive, especially in the faces, which have been built up using flats of colour to describe volume and form. The composition of the piece as a whole, and the attention to detail in the costumes, is really just the icing on the cake, and it’s damn good icing. The subtlety of the hatching to create the canvas-like texture that we read as “painting” pulls it together. It’s a truly gorgeous piece of work, and well deserving of a spot on this page.
Lastly, Del Mundo’s cover for X-Men Legacy #7 is most certainly not abstract. As one who is wrapping up a third year at art school, I’ve seen and dealt with my fair share of abstraction; the fact that you can still recognize this image as the human body means it doesn’t qualify. “Stylized” is about as deep as you can go before you run out of appropriate vocabulary for this; sorry, Babs. The use of illumination and geometry in this cover is really great; the artist’s command of the wash-like texture he’s applied to his colours (assuming this is digital work) augments the lighting effect. Compositionally it’s fairly sound. I don’t know that the diagonal orange strip at the bottom right is necessary; it clashes with the rest of the colour scheme and feels oddly superfluous and disconnected. Otherwise, the watercolour look that he’s got going on is really working for him.
That’s my two-cents. Cheers.
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