Friday, February 11, 2011

The Currently Greatest Comic Book Cover Ever



Many DC artists used this gray tone process to produce some very artistic covers, most notably Jack Adler and Bob Brown.

But never was the technique employed to the effect achieved in Adler's Brown's masterpiece for the cover of Challengers of the Unknown #11. Most artists would be content to have a bizarre alien blasting the Challengers, and to make it really weird, maybe have the laser blasts coming out of the alien's eyes! The artist has ably delivered on the strange alien part and could have washed off his brushes and gone home with the satisfaction of another fine, but workmanlike, job completed.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Adler Brown took this one to the next level by perching the alien on a flying Triceratops. Okay, that's really about all I can handle. But no, the artist is not content until he pushes aside my boundaries of how cool I think something can be and establish an entire new paradigm in comic book art by giving the flying dinosaur horse legs.


Correction: Thanks to Mr. Door Tree, and quoted from his comment: "Adler only did the post production work on it...Bob Brown did the ink wash artwork for this cover! Brown created three other ink wash covers at DC...House of Mystery #92, Tales of the Unexpected #43 and Tomahawk #65."

Thank you for educating me along with my two other readers.




Challengers of the Unknown
#11, January 1960.

4 comments:

Mr. Door Tree said...

That is a great cover but Adler only did the post production work on it...Bob Brown did the ink wash artwork for this cover! Brown created three other ink wash covers at DC...House of Mystery #92, Tales of the Unexpected #43 and Tomahawk #65. This is documented in the Ink Wash checklist that Roger Hill and I put together about ten years ago! Jerry Grandenetti was consulted about all this in the interview I conducted with him in 1995!

tom said...

Well, thanks for all that!

Stefan Poag said...

This is crazy great looking!

Dominic said...

This is the kind of random awesomeness the internet aspires to daily, and that would be almost impossible to get away with in mainstream comics today.