Be glad this wasn’t a lenticuilar cover.

§ October 12th, 2018 § Filed under marvel § 2 Comments

Just a brief reminder that I’m still taking your comics-related questions right at this post here, so feel free to chime in. I plan to start addressing them Monday, but keep adiding to the pile as you’d like!

In the meantime, let us contemplate this West Coast Avengers cover from 1986:


…in which Marvel celebrated its 25th anniversary by featuring portraits of characters on the covers, framed by a parade of other Marvel properties. I always found this cover to be a little…off, somehow. I know I had a particular coworker who always got a good chuckle out of it. I came across it again at my store the other day while processing some back issues, and decided to share the wealth on Instagram…but don’t wory, I have here for you, too:


“Hi Clint!”

Anyway, that’s some image…but my favorite of this specific line of covers is still the Barry Windsor-Smith pic of the Thing. And about ten years later, DC would do their own variation of that cover scheme. (Engendering this response, of course.)

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2 Responses to “Be glad this wasn’t a lenticuilar cover.”

  • Thelonious_Nick says:
    October 12, 2018 at 6:38 AM

    This is the first cover gimmick thing I remember. It certainly worked with 11-year old me! I didn’t have the funds or inclination to pick up every one of these issues, but I certainly stretched my wallet (I’m pretty sure these came out around my birthday, so I may have had a little more money than usual) to buy several from series I didn’t normally follow.

    Same with the two covers for the Peter Parker-Mary Jane wedding issue the following year. I got both of those, even though it was the same story inside. A real sacrifice, when your allowance is $2 a week or whatever.

    At least there were plenty of copies of all those covers. What turned me off the whole cover gimmick thing forever was the multiple covers for Spider-Man #1 with the artificial scarcity of certain versions. When I got to the store on the Saturday morning of the week that issue came out (that’s when my mom could take me), I found all that was left for me were the green cover second-printings, with the allegedly more valuable first-printings sold out. I was pretty irritated at that. (Apparently pull lists didn’t exist yet, or that store didn’t have them, or the store owner had never seen the need to inform a teen-ager who came in and spent all his money on comics every week of their availability.)

  • Turan, Emissary of the Fly World says:
    October 14, 2018 at 5:49 AM

    So, would it have killed them to put the Hulk next to Dr. Strange and Namor?