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I recently noticed in a fellow blogger's post about the JUSTICE LEAGUE Of AMERICA that the members, during the group's early years in the '60s, are often portrayed on the covers as being 'small' and therefore seemingly less powerful, or under the control of the bad guys.
So here are just a few covers where the heroes are shown either less than full size or facing a larger opponent! Do you think this was likely to have been a deliberate decision on the part of the editor because (for some reason) covers like this usually sold more copies, or could it just have been a coincidence?
Comments welcome.
9 comments:
Do the covers reflect the difference in size between the heroes and villains in the actual stories, BP, or are they merely symbolic?
The size difference does make for a dramatic cover in visual terms and may had piqued the interest of the comic buyer but maybe the novelty wore off after a while if they resorted to this one a little too often.
However there was also a trend with DC in putting Gorillas on their covers at around this time and I for one would have picked up every issue with a gorilla on it were the DC comics in wider distribution over here in the colony, but then I like gorillas so I'd be biased.
(Have you done a post collecting Gorilla covers?)
I remember reading about the gorilla covers, PC. 'Twas believed that issues with gorillas on the front sold more, hence their inclusion. Haven't done a post on gorillas so far - maybe Barry would oblige?
I don’t get it with the gorilla covers but then as a child I remember a news report with what they said were gorillas caught on film and being confused. I didn’t know about guerrillas then.
Talking of gorillas, CN, I'm preparing to re-read The Gorilla Hunters by R.M. Ballantyne - at least 47-48 years after first reading it back in the early '70s. It's a sequel to The Coral Island by the same author - with the characters now in adulthood.
At DC comics every cover was photographed and placed into a notebook. These, of course, were smaller than the original covers.
Beneath the picture was how many comics that issue sold. In the 1960s (and I am only discussing the late 1950s and 1960s )covers with Gorillas and monkeys AND THE COLOR YELLOW sold the most. Grodd in the Flash, CONGORILLA in many comics as filler, Congo Bill, Titano in Superman and so on.
This is not a joke. The publisher had to tell the DC editors that there would be a LIMIT to the amount of gorillas used each month.
Oh, I know it isn't a joke, BP, because I remember reading about the gorilla covers many years ago in some book or mag or other. Who'da thunk it, eh?
Some of the Justice League covers are symbolic (the Creeper as a puppeteer manipulating the superheroes), and some are literal (Shaggy Man was a giant King Kong-type monster).
Julius Schwartz in his autobiography, and Les Daniels in his book about the history of DC, both mention that comics with gorillas on the covers sold well. And, IIRC, that there was a limit of one ape cover per month, to avoid over-exposure.
I doubt if there was a hard-and-fast rule, or a specific number. Sometimes several months would go by without a single ape cover, and a few times there would be more than one in the same month. (Hawkman #6 and Fox & Crow #90 in December 1964, Star Spangled War Stories and Brave & Bold in February 1966, and Jerry Lewis #103 and Plastic Man #7 in September 1967.)
There were a total of nine ape covers in 1966 and seven in 1967, out of more than two dozen different titles that DC was publishing at the time.
Angel & the Ape started in 1968, so DC probably had ape covers for 10-12 months (however many issues that comic ran). But then, it would have been hard to keep co-star Sam Simian off of the cover of his own self-titled series.
I've got the Les Daniels' book, TC, but I remember reading about the gorilla covers long before that somewhere. I wonder if Marvel had a similar rule, something like there has to be a hot babe (or whatever) on so many covers a month? There's a couple of X-Men covers with Jean Grey in her new uniform that still give me a tingle after all these years. The only gorilla I remember on a Marvel cover is Grodd on an ish of FF. No doubt if you were to mention others then I'd probably recall them.
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