First, a little background: it's become a thing in comics now, from Marvel on down, to have some brilliant artist do a cover for a book, even if said artist hasn't read the comic and doesn't know what actually goes on in the story. While this makes for some dynamic covers, they essentially become pin-ups. For example, most months, you can pick-up any issue of Spider-man and see an amazing picture of him swinging through the city on the cover, but that doesn't necessarily mean he'll be swinging through the city in the actual book (I mean, he probably will, because that's what Spider-man does, but still... He may be swinging through the jungle.) When I was a young comic book collector, I liked the fact that the cover featured some aspect of what went on in the book, even though sometimes it was a very small aspect of the story. It was still cool to learn what may be coming in the next 22 pages, and a good way to advertise. In the real old days, the covers would often show the good guy in dire straits, while the bad guy stood over him, seemingly triumphant, and there would even be dialogue on the cover. The bad guy would say something like, "Prepare to meet your doom at the hands of the vile Paste Pot Pete!" And the hero would be lying on the ground, covered in paste. Now, the good guy would usually recover and beat the bad guy with his wits, but the cover gave you the indication that the bad guy at least got this far.John and I thought it would be a good idea, given the nature of our book, to have cover that did a bit of both: reflected what went on in the story, but also showcased the characters in that pin-up way. Also, through John's amazing coloring at IDW, he had the opportunity to work with a couple of brilliant artists who were willing to do covers for us. I mean, we paid them, obviously, but since they were only drawing the cover and not the whole book, we could use their name value to hopefully sell the book, and get a pretty snazzy cover out of it.
We first reached out to Robert Atkins, an artist whom we loved when we was working on IDW's G.I. Joe re-launch in 2008. Unfortunately, because Robert was in such high demand, he took awhile to get around to us, so his cover was bumped from issue #1 in favor of Stephen Molnar's cover, which I posted in the second post on November 2nd. Still Robert did an excellent job, based on a very small description of the book:
If you'll notice, the cover features the characters doing what they do, but it also reflects aspects of the story. Without giving away too much, Akira is on his jetpack, and there's a scary mummy in the background. (Spoiler warning!)
That trend continues with the second two issues, which features a huge underwater battle between Faith's buds and UMBRA agents. Issue #4's cover by Pedro Potier may be the best one of the bunch, but maybe because I'm a swimmer:
And, in case you were interested, yes, John did all the colors on these, so we can, and should, thank him for his amazing work. And buy all the books he works on. And buy Faith,when it comes out. And just generally support this stuff. These are our modern myths people (More on that in a future post. Probably tomorrow. I got a month to fill here.)
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