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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.
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“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
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This startling revision was an immediate win, according to Goodin.
“When this arrived in my inbox, I think I said out loud, ‘Holeee shit!‘” he recalled. “Jon Vermilyea took Venom, a Spider-Man villain that represented the gritted-teeth excesses of ’90s superhero comics, and made him truly shocking. I feel like I could get lost in his drips, folds and bumps. I would love to have a black-light poster of this.”
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“Ben was an artist I was unfamiliar with when he submitted this gem a few months ago,” Goodin said. “Batman comics from this era were pretty flat. But Ben took that and ran with it, creating something very graphic and exciting. I love Robin’s hair. The cover looks like it was painted on acoustic ceiling tiles.”
While evaluating submissions, Goodin, a full-time storyboard artist and part-time slave to comics, looks for some of the same qualities as conventional art critics: composition, line quality, color, artistic ability.
“A cover doesn’t have to have all of those things going for it,” he said, “but the more the better.”
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“Mark Todd was doing covers like this a few years before the blog and was one of the inspirations to start [Covered],” Goodin said. “He’s done probably 50 covers similar to this one. He’s someone who uses the original as a jumping-off point to go somewhere very, very different. This one won me over with the bag of fuzzy balls. What does ‘fragments’ mean? Why is that there? I love it.”
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Goodin doesn’t follow comics so much as he follows comics artists, including influences like Jack Kirby, Robert Crumb, Alex Toth, Dan Clowes and Jacques Tardi. Contributors to Goodin’s homage factory include established but still up-and-coming pros like Jeff Lemire, Dash Shaw, Johnny Ryan and Richard Sala.
“This was a very pleasant surprise,” Goodin said. “Someone e-mailed me a small file of this, and told me that a friend had commissioned Richard Sala to do it. I asked Richard if I could run it on the blog. He not only said yes, but sent me a better scan. I think that this painting has the creepy feel of the ’40s Batman comics.”
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“I really look at this one as a triumph of cartooning over more representational drawing in mainstream comics,” Goodin said. “In Rich Buckler’s version, all of the elements are there and the viewer immediately knows what’s happening, but in Jason’s version, the viewer really gets in the heads of the participants. I love how the hangmen are looking from under the brim of their hats and Jonah Hex’s crazed look. I’ve never bought a Jonah Hex comic, but I would if they looked like this.”
Most Covered contributors are on the path to becoming full-time comic artists, Goodin said.
“Because of comics’ economics, sadly very few would be considered pro, although there are quite a few that are established,” he added. “By established, I mean that they have a certain amount of popularity in the field, but may not be making a living doing it.”
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“Avengers 221 has become a bit of a standard for Covered,” Goodin said. “It started as a fluke when two different artists sent me the same cover within a week of each other. A third artist quickly added his spin to it and finally Jon Adams created a fourth one seen here — a cover that looks like it was designed by Marvel’s lawyers with a lot of tasty corporatespeak.”
To keep the mix of contributors fresh, Goodin lets months go by before he’ll publish covers by repeat artists.
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Finding the rare revision, from a noob or a pro, that stretches the envelope is Goodin’s ultimate goal.
“Paul Karasik’s Jimmy Olsen cover, more than any others, showed me a new way of looking at the original,” Goodin said. “By separating five distinct levels from Curt Swan’s original, one can see how Swan used the various overlapping levels of foreground, middle grounds and background to create his illusion of depth.
“However, since Swan is so strict with those levels, it appears like a diorama with cardboard cut-outs standing in a museum exhibition. He both creates depth and flatness simultaneously. It’s very strange.”
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“Michael DeForge’s cover is as trippy and weird as getting Fantastic Four creator Jack Kirby to do a comic based on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, which this cover is taken from,” Goodin said.
Goodin said he’s always on the hunt for contributions from graphic designers, illustrators, animators, photographers and other people “outside of the field of comics.”
“The more well-executed surprises, the better,” he said.
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“Something that I really enjoy about Danny Hellman’s Captain America cover is how thuggish and menacing Cap looks,” Good said. “Perhaps this version more accurately reflects our times.”
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