Sime on Covers
Jun. 14th, 2004 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jkcarrier
As usual, James Sime over at The Comic Pimp pulls no punches:
"Listen up, Mr. and Mrs. Comic Industry Professional, your comic book covers are killing your books."
And he makes some excellent points about the prevalence of covers that, while creative and beautifully drawn, do a lousy job of selling the comic.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I've been guilty of blowing off the covers for Fantasy Theater -- artist friends are always sending me nice pin-ups, so I usually just grab one and slap it on the cover:
No doubt about it, the artwork is great, and I like to think I do a pretty good job integrating the logo and other necessary type. But maybe I should be doing more? My background is in design, perhaps I ought to be designing covers from scratch, instead of working with whatever (admittedly sweet) artwork comes in over the transom. Of course, that would probably mean (shudder) drawing it myself, so the results might be better design but worse illustraion, which ain't much of a trade-off. I dunno, it's just one of the many things I fret about in the course of a day...
"Listen up, Mr. and Mrs. Comic Industry Professional, your comic book covers are killing your books."
And he makes some excellent points about the prevalence of covers that, while creative and beautifully drawn, do a lousy job of selling the comic.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I've been guilty of blowing off the covers for Fantasy Theater -- artist friends are always sending me nice pin-ups, so I usually just grab one and slap it on the cover:
No doubt about it, the artwork is great, and I like to think I do a pretty good job integrating the logo and other necessary type. But maybe I should be doing more? My background is in design, perhaps I ought to be designing covers from scratch, instead of working with whatever (admittedly sweet) artwork comes in over the transom. Of course, that would probably mean (shudder) drawing it myself, so the results might be better design but worse illustraion, which ain't much of a trade-off. I dunno, it's just one of the many things I fret about in the course of a day...
