Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got eight new comics:

Clone – 8

Fatale – 15

Mind MGMT – 12

The Massive – 13

Hoax Hunters: Case Files – 1

Lazarus – 1

X-O Monowar – 14

Jupiter’s Legacy – 2

This week’s comic book cover to look at and examine is “Justice League of America” #190 by Brian Bolland cover dated May 1981. Growind up I was not a DC Comics kid. I was a Marvel Comics kid. I didn’t buy many DC comics in the late 1970s. It wasn’t until I was in high school (80-84) that I started buying DC comics regularly. This one was from my freshman year in high school.

This cover did its job. I distinctly remember picking the comic up out of the spinner rack to see what the heck was going on in it. Here we have a giant star-thing standing over the whole JLA and a lot of the city and blasting away as our heroes stand there with smaller weird bulls-eyes star-things stuck on their faces. I had no idea that Starro, the villain of the comic, was a giant space starfish who mind controls things. I figured out the mind control angle pretty easily but a giant space starfish?

This isn’t the usual action oriented super-hero cover but I found it intriguing anyway. Our heroes captured and passive while the whole city also suffers all clearly delineated by Brian Bolland. It made me pick it up and buy it. I liked that it was different.

Besides the nice artwork the type on this cover is well done. The top holds the logo, trade dress, and caption boxes and despite its business is well organized. The overlapping works nicely too. I like how the Starro box is over the DC logo but under the JLA logo box. Then the caption box is over the JLA logo with Starro’s arms on top of all the type. It adds more depth to the cover than usual. The grey building fading into the background make a nice backdrop to it all.

Good type work, foreground, middle ground, background distinction, a weird and interesting story, solid color design, and nice drawing all made for a cover that I remember all these years later.