The Scourge of the Cover Artist

We Stopped Valuing Artists As Storytellers When “Comic Book Cover Artist” Became a Thing

You can’t judge a book by its cover.  But if we’ve learned nothing else in recent years, it’s that you can certainly sell lots of books by their cover.  

Or, specifically, their covers.

Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of covers.

The Art Drain of Covers

— or —

Comic Book Cover Artists: Threat or Menace?

We lost far too many good comic artists starting in the 90s when they discovered they could make a living just drawing covers.

We accepted, as an industry, that certain people draw very pretty pictures but will never train themselves to draw enough of them fast enough to handle a monthly book again. Rather than putting them on long-term projects where they could do complete books at a slower pace, we just had them draw pin-ups professionally.

That’s the same kind of work we tell every wannabe comic book artist to avoid putting in their portfolio, yet it pays the best.

We accepted that it’s a better investment for the long-term health of comics to pay cover rates so high that the most popular comic book artists could make a better living just drawing covers. We gave up on some of the most talented artists by disincentivizing them, financially, from drawing interiors.

How many evergreen titles have we lost out on because the artists that would have made them shine are merely drawing their covers or, worse, drawing Variant Cover C of some forgotten comic at a publisher whose entire publishing program is “15 variants of every comic to profit!”

Quick: Give me a list of all the evergreen collected editions available today featuring stories drawn by J. Scott Campbell, Adam Hughes, or Jae Lee. These are three people who’ve been in the industry for 30 years. They have huge fanbases. What’s their body of comics work? Let’s see: “Danger Girl,” “Justice League America”, “Inhumans”. (Is there a “Gen13” collection in print right now?)

A combined 100 years of comics experience and a half dozen books to show for it?

What went wrong?

The Dawn of the “Comic Book Cover Artist”

In the 1990s, a whole new career popped into existence: Comic Book Cover Artist.

Like baseball niched down to “the closer,” comics niched down to “comic book cover artist.”  

To go along with that, baseball conceived of the “middle reliever” position, which has none of the glory and all of the risks and shortfalls.  Comics came up with “the fill-in artist”: people who can finish a book on time when there’s a deadline issue, but aren’t popular enough or good enough yet to hold their own series.

Artists who started their careers drawing sequential narratives became so popular for their style that they didn’t need to draw a page a day anymore.

I don’t blame them.  It has to be a heck of a lot easier — getting paid more for drawing less? — plus you get a greater diversity of things to draw.

But I do miss it when they drew stories and full interiors —  in many cases, monthly. Yes, at one point or another, every artist you complain about today for being unable to keep a schedule, used to draw monthly comics.  Maybe not for long, but they worked it out at one point in their career.  Then they got popular and — froze up?  Stopped working too much?  Worked smarter instead of harder? Changed business models with the industry?

The Trappings of Success

I’ve always figured that there are two mindsets that might happen when you have enough experience doing a thing.  You either get slower at it because you’re analyzing your work too closely or because you’re always trying to top it.  Or you get faster, because you have the experience and know-how to do the work and know all the shortcuts.

Cover artists are firmly in that first camp.  They’re often the most neurotic of the bunch, knowing that their fans expect something so crazy good every time out that they have to draw and redrew and tweak everything to perfection.

I miss the raw energy of their earlier work, though.

I miss the earlier day of comics when people would learn from their experience and apply that to the same kind of job.

I miss seeing more artwork from artists whose stuff I like, but who don’t draw comics anymore.

The Metamorphosis of the Cover, The Creative Team, and the Sales Department

We’re so used to this by now that we don’t even expect the cover to represent the interior of the book in any way.  

15 years ago, the complaint was that covers were designed to be used on any comic in any month and then reused for posters or whatever licensed products they might be good for.  We complained that they weren’t story-specific

Nowadays, not only are they not story specific, they’re not even from the same artist as the interiors.  We don’t blink.  We don’t expect them to be anything more than the base upon which the publisher will serve up a series of increasingly rare pin-ups to sell to the same collectors in lieu of finding a new audience.

Milking existing fans is so much easier than finding new ones.  

I get it. Marketing is tough.  It takes patience and time and money.

When has the comics industry ever been any good at those three things?

In lieu of having a sales team to do their job, or a marketing team to do theirs, we just have the position of “cover artist” added to the creative team. If your regular series artist draws the covers, it’s to the detriment of sales.  It means the publisher can’t be bothered to pay up the extra few bucks to get a superstar on the book’s “creative team.”

What does it say about a Marvel or DC comic today when the interior artist draws the cover?  It means you’re not going to get any marketing on it.  It’s not seen as one of the important titles that month.

Or this happens to be the lull where there’s no company-wide “event” series of covers like, say, using trading cards from 25 years ago as covers due to complete and total creative bankruptcy.

And cheapness.  Let’s throw that in there, too.

The Trap That Might Spring

Are covers all that important anymore?  In a world of digital comics, do we need covers that jump off the stands?

Digital publishers in regular fiction and non-fiction worlds have been asking themselves about that since eBooks became a thing. They seem to have decided that book cover design is just as important, if not more so.  Digital books need to catch your eye at a very small size on a screen crowded with images.  The design changes to fit the format, is all.

Can this apply to comics, as well? Will we see simpler, bolder images on covers to jump out better on a crowded Comixology/Marvel Unlimited/Kindle screen at some point? Will cover artists who get so lost in their own details not be as necessary anymore in a world where none of that detail will be seen until after the purchasing decision has been made?

Or will comics turn into novels and just feature the writer’s name taking up half the cover, with a small image at the bottom? They’ve tried that technique with trades before when they had a really big writer to feature from another industry. It didn’t go over to well with the artists who also tend to work on comics, I bet.

We know Amazon’s system has historically featured writers and often ignored the rest of the creative team. Hopefully, Amazon’s move to take over Comixology’s website will improve that. If it doesn’t, will this style of cover become the norm?

Astonishing X-Men by JOSS WHEDON collected edition
(Yikes, this cover hasn’t aged well, has it?)

Did artists just trade in their careers for a niche that might blow away in the digital winds?

Not yet, clearly.

What Does It All Mean?

The role of “cover artist” gives some of the best artists in comics the chance to stop drawing comics, starving the industry of top-flight talent to tell stories and create long-lasting and memorable runs.

It lets the marketing/sales department slide on outreach in exchange for milking the increasingly skinny cow they’ve made a living milking for years and years.

It further hides the work of the interior artist, who isn’t deemed to be popular enough to sell a reader on an issue. Hide him inside.  Don’t let him draw the cover!

Sales on monthlies (past issue #1 and not counting the dozen cover variant schemes for each issue) keep sliding, royalties are minimal to non-existent, and so the top talent won’t waste their time chained to their desks drawing interiors. It doesn’t make financial sense.

And with double shipping, the interior artist position is a revolving door, with one A-List player at best coming through the door.

But that’s OK, because the units are moving!  And writers can write an extra book every month, so editorial can just concentrate on them, pair them up with their virtual bullpen, and push another cog through the system.

Personally

I get it.  As a business person — which is what freelance artists really have to be — the idea of becoming a cover artist and getting paid more to draw fewer pages is just a smart move.  It’ll increase your perceived value in the original art market, too. (I bet that most cover artists are sure to have a physical artifact when they’re done for the art collector’s market.)

As a comics fan, I mourn the loss of long-running creative teams.  Many artists made their names doing such series. Their runs are memorable.  They built their reputation and their popularity by appearing month-in and month-out often for years before moving on.

But in the assembly line fashion of drawing comics, you can’t blame the cogs for playing the game back and succeeding.  They’re still making enough fans happy to make a living. It’s a good business move.

As a reader, I wish the comics industry were set up in a way that rewarded longer runs.  But it’s a perfect storm of commercial interests and weaknesses in the Direct Market system.

Worst of all, it’s short-term thinking.  I think one of the reasons we’ve seen so few new evergreen books in recent years is that the kinds of big names that could sell those books are only doing their covers.

That’s not the only reason — a market that doesn’t reward series for making it past issue #12 is obviously a bigger factor — but it is a contributing one.

Or they’ll hire the big name artist to draw the first issue or three before handing it off to someone who won’t break the budget, creating an end product that’s uneven and only half-wanted further down the line.

It’s too bad. I miss the days when the best artists were rewarded for drawing the best comics, not Cover C of this week’s new #1 issue.

You’ll also never get a second Image Comics style breakout event happening when all the artists popular enough to break off and do their own comics gave up doing them years ago in favor of drawing pretty covers.

No wonder why Marvel is so happy with this set-up…

The Downside to Artists

On the other hand, this career move is potentially limited for the artist, as well.

I doubt they’re getting royalties on their covers. They might if one is used for the cover of a collected edition, I suppose, but they’re competing with all the other cover artists who worked on those issues for that spot.

They’re also still operating at the mercy of the comic book companies. If they decide the artist doesn’t sell comics anymore, or if they have a hot new artist they want to transition to covers, it’s out with the old and in with the new.

The trick to being a professional cover artist is to build up other parts of your business to ensure that the loss of these covers doesn’t crash your whole world down on your shoulders. It’s the same as being the monthly artist on “Batman” and not having something after that lined up. Eventually, they will put a new team on there. Are you sure they’ll give you other work? Even if they want to, can they?

This is why building your own fanbase, owning your own intellectual property, and playing the long game with licensing rights and the like is so important. You’re better off being in a position where only you can fire yourself.

Otherwise, it’s just a matter of time before THEY fire YOU.

(This is also why I think J. Scott Campbell is such a smart artist/business person. He’s smart enough to make his own books, design his own statues, etc. in addition to the cover art. Multiple streams of income. See “The Only Person Who Can Pop a Comic Book Artist” for more on him.)

On a Related Note

I covered a bit of this on episode #58 of The Pipeline Comics Podcast last year.

In that episode, I looked at the week’s new releases from Dynamite: Five new issues, and fifty variant comics.

On the bright side, Dynamite is paying an awful lot of artists to draw stuff for them. Yet, it’s not as many you’d think, since half of the variant covers are copy-less variant versions of the original variant covers.

It’s turtles all the way down….

I just checked this week’s new release list, and things haven’t changed at all. I had to shrink the font down on my web browser all the way to fit all the line items on a single 27″ screen:

Dynamite has five new issues and this many alternate covers this week.

That’s five new issues. I lost count at the number of line items after 60.

Oh, some of those aren’t this week’s new comics — they’re variant covers for previous weeks’ comics. That kind of makes it worse.

I don’t understand how this is sustainable in the long run. I guess each cover type has its own brand of fan, and if you put them all together you can sell enough copies to print one issue?

The question in the industry today, of course, is whether this system can continue in an age of paper and printer shortages. If there’s one good thing about the production pipeline problems in this world right now, it could just be the death of this business model.


What do YOU think? (First time commenters' posts may be held for moderation.)