6.24.2007

It worked so well the first time...

Every now and then, a comic book cover becomes iconic and inspires artists to do their own riff on it. Some people call it swipes, but I think it's more homage. When the source material is so well known and so obvious, the repeating artist is not trying to say "Hey, look at my all-new original idea!" They're paying tribute to the original. A swipe is when an artist copies someone else's work and tries to act like they didn't. That's my opinion.

Anyway: When George Perez drew the cover for the first issue of The New Teen Titans back in 1980...who knew? Probably no one. Because no one paid homage to it for 16 years. And then it was George paying homage to himself. But boy did that open up the flood gates. Take a look:


New Teen Titans (1st series) 1.
November 1980

New Titans 130.
February 1996

Titans Secret Files and Origins 1.
1999

10th Muse (vol 2) 1.
July 2002

Teen Titans (3rd series) 1
2nd print. September 2003

New Teen Titans: Terror of Trigon TPB. 2003

Teen Titans (3rd series) 25.
August 2005

Official Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide: 35th Edition. 2005

Transformers: Beast Wars: The Gathering 1. June 2006

Teen Titans (3rd series) 41.
January 2007

2 comments:

  1. I was thinking about doing something similar to this on my page someday soon. I was thinking the classic hero holding the dead heroine cover, ala Supergirl's death in Crisis. I'm sure there a lots of examples of these kinds of things. Very nice job.

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  2. I had no idea that cover was ripped off so many times! This probably beats out Giant-Size X-Men's cover in number of homages.

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