Comic Cover Critique Part 2

Yesterday I was critical of Jim Lee's Justice League cover, and to balance that here's the cover for Uncanny X-Men 275. This cover has had a huge impact on me - when I saw it, I was reading the Finnish reprints of Uncanny X-Men which were almost a hundred issues behind, but upon seeing this cover, I was so intrigued of the weird changes to the usual look of X-Men that I started reading the English Uncanny X-Men starting as well, and for a 13-year old Claremont's prosaic language was great for learning the language.

The three-fold cover has a well-thought symmetric composition, the white background is effective with the complementary yellows in the costumes and the purple of the side characters. Gritty but monumental!

Comic Cover Critique Part 1

Jim Lee is a wonderful artist, and though he is appreciated for his dynamic depiction of superheroes, he also can infuse his drawings with atmosphere, but not in this case. The cover for the first issue of Justice League tries to deliver on the iconic level and the composition aims to be dynamic: characters come towards the viewer, the colors try to be vibrant and the different colors of energies and general razzle-dazzle aims to be electrifying and youthful.

But the flag-ship of DC's re-launch lacks a message and a point of view - it fails to promise anything new or interesting to either old or new fans. At least to me it's a dull, generic marketing image with the iconic heroes stripped of their personality. And what does the Green Lantern's "cock" is tell of the maturity-level of the image?

I suppose it is the difficulty of a first issue cover for a team book when the image has to introduce all the players, but in my opinion Lee did a more impactful job on his covers for X-Men and Uncanny X-Men.