Day Ninety-Two: Comics' Constantly Copied Covers #2

Erm... yes. Well, this is a little embarrassing. Remember when I said, back on Day Six, that I'd be doing a couple of these comparisons of frequently-homaged covers during the course of the blog's run? Well, I might have, y'know, completely forgotten. Still, I'm going back through the whole blog now, closing off any tangents that are still hanging around, and I think that over the next week and a day I'll have covered everything I said I was going to. And speaking of covers, back to the point.

In 1976, one of Marvel's lowest-selling titles was on the brink of cancellation. It was running reprint stories and was being published bimonthly. Rather than cancel it, Marvel decided to overhaul the line-up of the team whose book it was, and give it to new creators to re-stock the group with new characters and do something, anything, with it that would mean it avoided cancellation. The creators were Len Wein and the late Dave Cockrum, and the book was X-Men. When Giant-Size X-Men #1, featuring the debut of the new team (which featured characters like Storm, Nightcrawler and Colossus making their first appearances, and also had some short hairy grumpy Canadian guy in it), nobody could have guessed that they'd just witnessed the birth of what would become comics' biggest publishing juggernaut. They also couldn't have guessed that Marvel had just published a comic that had one of the most enduring cover images in comics history.

The genuine article.

Now, in later years, X-Men-related comics have tended to return to this well quite a lot. It's a striking picture, and the thought of the old team reacting in shock to the new is a powerful image in that it implies violent upheaval of the status quo. Strangely, though, three of the most notable instances of it being homaged by other X-books feature non-violent things like babies and fat people.

Ah, the days before digital colouring. "RED! Make it RED!"

Too darned cute to live.

Okay, so maybe a woman with a machine gun is slightly threatening, I'll give them that.

The other reason for this particular cover being used a lot is for parody purposes - it's an instantly recognisable image if you're a comics reader, and it works as a sort of shorthand. It doesn't even need to be covering a story which has anything to do with a new team, or a parody of the X-Men - it's often just used because people will look at it and say "Hmm. That's a pastiche of the cover of Giant-Size X-Men #1. Its witty dissection of our comic book culture must be worth a look". See exhibits A, B and C below.

Bender as Wolverine = comics greatness

Nice use of the wee yellow stripe in the corner and everything.

Look! It's Invincible! Yay!

Strangely, although Marvel's popular gorefest series Marvel Zombies has had zombified versions of classic Marvel covers as its calling card, no issue, reprint or collection has yet had Giant-Size X-Men #1 as its cadaverous front-piece. Of course, that may be because Marvel felt that doing so would be too soon after X-Men: Deadly Genesis #1 did something similar.

He's got an arm off and everything.

Even the dinky toy line known as Minimates got in on the act when they produced a box set of the Giant-Size X-Men #1 team (or most of them).

Aww, da liddle cutie pies.

So there you have it, folks. A legendary cover, and one which has been ripp... er, homaged more times than Wolverine's had hot poutine. Now away you go and wonder why it is that a medium so happy to be incessantly self-referential to the point of creatively eating its own tail hasn't made more headway into the general popular cultural conversation. You probably won't have to wonder long. Maybe I'm being too hard on the comics biz, though. After all, it is a pretty cool picture.