Now, an asstute reader may notice this version is a bit different than the version that ran on Covered. Why is that you ask? Well, keep reading and all will be revealed.

First off, for those who don’t know, the whole point of the Covered blog is for artists to do their own version of an older comic book cover. The cover that they redo doesn’t nessessary have to be a Golden Age/Silver Age book like I used. As long as it’s a cover by someone else, it’s cool. But I think that taking the much older covers and really trying to make the pop in a contemporary way is really fun, so that’s what I tried to do. Anyway, here is the original version of the cover, from June of 1952:

Pretty epic, right? (Though, I will admit I haven’t actually read the issue, so I don’t really know why The Human Firefly is attacking Batman and Robin with some sort of gay-friendly death ray, as opposed to, you know, fire…)

Like I said before, what I really wanted to do was update it and give it modern cover copy and detailing, as if this was a new comic that had come out today. To my mind, this meant a few things, not the least of which was using the current logo copy. It also meant adding certian information to the cover, and taking off other things. Specifically, I did some research so that I could add the writer, penciler and inker credits to the cover, (France Herron, Dick Sprang and Charles Paris respectively), a standard practice on most comic book covers these days. DC Comics still uses the Comics Code insignia, so I added that, as well at the date. Also, I got decided to get rid of the story related copy, (“Batman and Robin face a new menace…”), because, even though I think that sort of thing is cool and funny, and it does show up on contemporary covers from time to time, to me, that sort of thing is very Silver Age and isn’t really used other than as a reference to the comics of yesteryear.

Also, there was a nice little coincedence between the new Detective Comics covers and this older issue:

As shown in the image above, for the last few months, Detective Comics has been running backup stories staring The Question, compelte with a graphic annoucing it right on the cover. Detective Comics #184 also had a backup story, that one staring Pow Wow Smith, Indian Lawman, (one of the more politically incorrectly named charaters from DC’s stable). Since I was commited to replicating the current cover copy, this worked out well, because I could still have the Pow Wow Story represented without having to invent a graphic element for it.

BUT! I did want to make a joke about the fact that there is no way a company like DC Comics would publish a comic called Pow Wow Smith, Indian Lawman today, so I did do a little inventing. It turns out that the character of Pow Wow still technically exsists in the DC Universe, but he now goes by his real name Ohiyesa, having rejected the white man’s racist lableing. Using that as a starting point, I came up with logo for the character, one that I hoped would read as authentic looking, but also funny and a bit over P.C.:

The only other thing I wanted to do was make sure that the price tag on the bar code was only 10 cents, the cover price back in 1952. It took a little while to assemble everything, and I think that I sorta fudged the Second Feature text, (I couldn’t really find the right font on my computer, so I had to just draw the letters. I’m sure keener eyes than mine could probably spot the font right away). Here’s all the copy, sans image:

To be honest, the cover copy was actually the most work, the rest was really just executing an idea. I knew that I wanted the colors to be really bold and jagged, and I wanted to do something with an exaggerated halftone. The halftone pattern in the background is an image of an actual firefly, (Photuris lucicrescens), with a circular pattern emiting from the center, so emulate the ray from the original cover. Then I just drew Batman and Robin in silhouette, but it’s pretty much the same pose as the original cover. I did this because I wanted to retain at least something of the original, even it’s a bit oblique in its presentaion. From there, I just played around with the depth of the logo copy so that everything was readable, and then Voilà! Cover.

But, there is a bit more. The version that ran on Covered had a red Batman and Robin, not a white version, like the one at the top of the post. Why’s that? Well, my original vision was that the cover actually be a really cheesy animated GIF file. That’s actually why I chose the Firefly cover, because I wanted element of it to cycle through the colors of the rainbow. Unfortunately, when the file was posted, the animation would simply stall on the first frame of the GIF, leaving the red silhouettes. I hadn’t seen an animated cover, yet, so hopefully I’ll be able to figure out what went wrong. I imagine it might have something to do with the way that file was exported. I don’t actually have a lot of experience with that sort of thing, and I suspect the file I supplied disagreed with the blogging engine that posted it. It’s a bit of a bummer, but I can’t really complain, since getting my cover posted got a ton of eyes on my site and it was a really fun project to try before school hit full steam ahead.

Anyway, here’s the GIF. Hopefully it’ll cycle right.

PEACE!