You Can Judge a Book by Its Cover (Part 1)

In case you didn't realize it by now, I love romance comics. A lot.

But as much as I love them, they sometimes can be hard to read. They're often times too wordy, the stories (featuring one of 4 possible tales, featuring two of 6 possible characters) are predictable, and the art is often not of the highest quality (for every Alex Toth or Bernard Sachs or Jay Scott Pike there are countless unknown [unfortunately] and not very talented artists).

But what you could usually rely on is that the romance comic had a terrific cover.

Most of the early romance comics featured a photo cover, and they were usually stock photos that were either part of the publishing company's other publications (like with Fawcett or Atlas) or from movie promotional pictures (Prize), but they were for the most part rather boring and had little (or nothing) to do with the stories inside the comic.

There were others (such as the painted cover, which I'll talk about later, and the standard splash, which I'll also discuss), but my favorite of all is what I call the "panel" cover. For the most part, these covers were only on titles put out by Atlas, and they featured a panel culled from each of the stories inside, each placed on the cover with a description or title for each. The largest, usually from the first story of the comic, would be the largest, and it would often have a word balloon or a larger caption along with the story's title. (Sometimes, like in this issue of Justice, all the panels come from the same story.)

There was nothing particularly exciting about these covers, and most of the times it wasn't an artist who put the covers together but an in-house production person, but to me, they scream "value", as if you know there's going to be 4 great stories inside, 4 great tales about love and heartbreak, and even a guy who sometimes gets rough with his girl and only to get socked by the guy with a golden heart.

Certainly there isn't much to them, and they didn't last very long, Stan Lee and Atlas eventually going to the more common splash cover, but while they lasted and even today, they certainly jump out at you.

(Cover courtesy Atlas Tales, a terrific and informative site that any comic book fan should enjoy.)