Ken Scudder wants to know something…
Big fan of pretty much everything you've done except your ill-considered attacks on cole slaw.
Stupid question, so I thought to ask you. Back when comic covers were more than just pin-ups having nothing to do with the story, more often than not they had word balloons. Many of these were variations on "Superman, you've got to save xxx" and Superman just sitting on his Kryptonian ass ignoring it. My stupid question — who wrote those word balloons? Dumb follow-up — how was this coordinated with the cover artist?
I thank you for your time and attention to this highly trivial matter.
Most of the time, covers started out with a sketch that may or may not have been by the person who did the finished art. During the time Carmine Infantino was in an executive position at DC Comics, he did most of these sketches, often consulting with the book's editor, and Carmine approved and fiddled with those he didn't do. At Marvel during the same period, Stan Lee had approval and the sketches were worked up by a number of folks but mostly Marie Severin or John Romita, everyone working under Stan's supervision and final OK.
If the cover sketch incorporated word balloons or cover blurbs, they were usually planned as part of the layout…so whoever suggested the scene might also suggest the text. These were more or less committee decisions. I sat in once on a cover conference with Infantino and with Julius Schwartz, who was the editor of the book in question. Schwartz suggested a couple of different wordings until they hit on one Infantino liked.
Carmine moved from being an artist for DC into an executive position by suggesting a reason that the management there could believe as to why Marvel was increasing its market share and DC's was declining. They would never accept the premise that maybe the Marvel books were better but they could accept that maybe Marvel's covers were more exciting. Most of the DC editors at the time designed their own covers and these men were not for the most part, artists. They came up with covers with intriguing (they hoped) plot twists but not interesting visuals.
Look at the Superman covers from this period and you'll see an awful lot that show The Man of Steel standing around…and you don't know what's intriguing about the situation depicted unless you read the word balloons. Infantino argued successfully that covers should be designed by artists who could make the visuals exciting…and he got himself a job.
Once a cover was drawn, both Stan and Carmine liked to fiddle with it. This is less true of the folks who've been in charge of covers since then. But sometimes, they'd order changes — some trivial, some major — to an almost-final cover and that often included rewriting the cover copy to make it punchier. Almost anyone in the office could have pitched in on this.
The last few decades though, there is a sense that the purchase of a certain comic book is no longer an impulse buy. A kid is no longer studying at a comic book rack in a 7-Eleven store or market, trying to decide if he'll spend his pocket change on a comic book or a candy bar. So there's less tendency to try and hook a browser with a situation that causes them to think, "I need to buy this and find out how Batman survives what's happening to him on the cover." That kind of cover usually meant expository word balloons.
So we now have less words on covers. We also have artists submitting their own rough sketches and then doing finished art for covers they initially conceived. Most of them tend not to suggest a lot of cover copy.
