They had a problem at DC Comics in the mid-sixties: Sales on everything except the Batman books were inching downwards…and Batman was only doing well because of the TV show. At the same time, sales on the new Marvel line were going up. In fact, the Marvel books were gaining at almost the exact same rate the DC books were losing. DC's head honchos began to study the Marvel books, trying to figure out the reason for this aberration of the marketplace.
In later years, some of them would deny it but others say it was true; that the DC execs thought the Marvel books were horrible — bad art, bad stories, bad characters, bad everything. DC artist Mike Sekowsky used to do an impression of the company's publisher throwing down a Marvel book and gasping, "This is garbage! The readers have no taste!" At some point, an explanation began to emerge for the ghastly sales trends. Obviously, it went, readers were getting confused and were buying non-DC books thinking they were DCs. It was decided that something had to be done to make their covers more distinctive and identifiable. Editorial Director Irwin Donenfeld would later receive the credit/blame (pick one) for adorning DC's covers with a hideous checkerboard pattern across the top. They called them, I'm afraid, "go-go checks" and it was the ugliest thing anyone had done to comics since Dr. Wertham called them "blueprints for delinquency."
No, they didn't help sales. Matter of fact, DC's slide hastened…and while there were certainly other reasons for that, it was suggested that the go-go checks had made things worse. "Readers could now spot the DC books much quicker, making it easier to avoid purchasing them," was how Sekowsky put it. After eighteen months, they got rid of the checks and not long after, they got rid of Irwin Donenfeld, which was quite a firing since his father had founded the company. So I guess you could say that "go-go checks" across the top of a cover was a pretty awful idea…
…which is why I was amazed to see TV Guide try it recently. One wonders if someone there did it as a kind of inside joke for those who remember the DC experiment. Yeah, maybe the Nascar theme suggested a checkered flag motif but the reference there to "Dynamic Duos" also invokes the 1966-1968 Batman comics. Either way, they're lucky that they only did it for one week. If they'd put go-go checks on their covers regularly, they'd be out of business in a year.