Some great covers!

Yesterday was one of the best days for comic book covers that I can remember in quite a while. A great cover to me isn't just a posed shot of a character doing something generic (like most of Thor's covers, which don't suggest how good that book is) or a group action image. I think a cover has to make a person want to pick up that book in the sea of all the others on the shelves (and I realize that isn't easy to do on a monthly basis), it should be a solid visually appealing singular piece of art, and if it's able to do those two things and actually have something to do with the actual issue - bonus. Presented here are five of my favorites this week.

The first one is the newest Catwoman, with art by Adam Hughes (he doesn't do the interior which sometimes bothers me as in this case I'm sure interior artist David Lopez could do nice covers, but I can understand why a company would want to use marquee artists to help books sell). I'm not the biggest fan of Adam Hughes (I know that's sacrilige in a lot of circles), not because I don't think he's a good artist, rather his kind of big breasted cheesecake isn't my favorite kind of cheesecake. With this cover though, Hughes draws an image of Catwoman that has a lot to do what happens within (a good solid issue after some lame prison world tie in issues) and is just a wow image all around.

This cover of Twilight Guardian (a series of one shot characters by Top Cow in their Pilot Season title) by artist Reza, who also does the interior. This is definitely an atypical image for a Top Cow comic and I like it because the character has a nice quiet reflective expression (the cat's cool also). This odd little story of this girl who patrols her neighborhood looking for crime and or evil doers is written by Troy Hickman and I hope to see more.



>Hellblazer's covers used to be consistently striking, but for the longest time now they've been amongst the biggest offenders of the generic pose image. This cover by Lee Bermejo justs jumps out for me as I like the placement of the logo (which is on the women's arm on the actual comic) and the central character (John Constantine). There's a preview of the new Vertigo series coming out called Madame Xanadu which I haven't read yet, but it looks good.





I've got a lot of problems with the Spider-Man comic post (and during) the storyline One More Day with them hitting the reset button, but this cover by Marcos Martin, who also does the interior art, is a perfect example of how to draw Spider-Man combining Ditko sensiblities with great sequential story-telling sequences.


>Dark Ivory is Joseph Michael Lisner's new book, co-written by Eva Hopkins, and this cover, while very much a posed character image, is one in which it easily stands out from any other cover around it and the eye can't help but gravitate towards it.