A Cover a Day

[Steve W]

Ok, how about this for an idea.  We take it in turns to post a favourite (British spelling) comic cover every day.  This went really well on the comic fan website that I used to frequent.  What we tried to do was find a theme or subject and follow that, until we all got bored with that theme.  I'd like to propose a theme of letters of the alphabet. So, for the remainder of October (only 5 days) and all of November, we post comic cover pictures associated with the letter "A".  Then in December, we post covers pertaining to the letter "B".  The association to the letter can be as tenuous as you want it to be. For example I could post a cover from "Adventure Comics" or "Amazing Spider Man".  However Spider Man covers can also be posted when we're on the letter "S".  Adventure Comic covers could also be posted when we're on the letter "L" if they depict the Legion of Super Heroes.  So, no real hard, fast rules - in fact the cleverer the interpretation of the letter, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

And it's not written in stone that we have to post a cover every day. There may be some days when no cover gets posted. There's nothing wrong with this, it just demonstrates that we all have lives to lead.

 

If everyone's in agreement I'd like to kick this off with one of my favourite Action Comic covers, from January 1967. Curt Swan really excelled himself here.

Discussion and voting on future monthly themes takes place on the "Nominations, Themes and Statistics for A Cover A Day" thread.  Click here to view the thread.

 

 

[Steve W]

U-Comix #61.

[Richard Willis]

Thor first held aloft the hammer Mjolnir.

Hank Pym donned his cybernetic helmet, becoming Ant-Man.

The FF squared off against Namor and Doctor Doom.

I’m passing it up, like I have the other “19xx” titles. At the time, 14-year-old me was buying Fantastic Four (since the previous month), Amazing Adult Fantasy and sometimes the western titles. Dropping the word “Adult” from the title for #15 was probably smart. The word may have caused some issues not to sell.

I think the reason that Spider-Man, Thor and Ant-Man all debuted in the same month was that Stan had been bugging Martin Goodman about starting more superheroes. By the time he got the okay, Stan and Jack had time to prepare the material with increasing confidence that it would be published. Ditko must have been okay with Spidey, too. I believe they were already/still laboring under DC’s restriction on the number of titles DC would distribute for them, so all of them started out adding the heroes to an existing book and hanging on to the mystery and science fiction stories. Also, their earlier titles FF and Hulk had prominently featured monsters, but were 100% superhero. They were trying to add more readers without losing the ones they already had. Goodman may have insisted that the new superheroes not be book-length.

I wasn’t immediately on board with Spidey, as I’ve said before, because I really liked the previous format of Ditko’s AAF. Other than the house ads, I think I may have seen a single Hulk issue on the rack and never saw the Thor and Ant-Man issues until much later.

[Lee Houston, Junior]

Almost didn't make it today. Before my time, but Batman wasn't the only hero(es) fighting colorful villain(s). Image courtesy of the Grand Comics Database.)

[Philip Portelli]

The Bifrost without Thor! 

[Richard Willis]

Jimmy Olsen #18

[JD DeLuzio]

I believe there's an anniversary today:

 

[Peter Wrexham]

This isn't a Pride cover, but the comic includes an important early (November 1991) Pride scene.

The Flash (Wally West) is chatting with the Pied Piper, a friend who is a reformed super-villain, and asks him whether the Joker is gay.  The Piper's reply startles Wally.

[Eric L. Sofer]

[Steve W]

 Not a cover but I found this on BlueSky.

[Dave Palmer]