Best Cover artist - Who gets you to pick up the book?

[thwhtGuardian]

A Mike Mignola cover could probably get me to buy just about anything on impulse.

The last book I actually bought justt for the cover though:



And who can blame me?

[dupersuper]

George Perez:

[dupersuper]

[LEADER DESSLOK]

All those mentioned were amazing cover designers, especially Gil Kane, who "convinced" me to buy many a comic book in the 70s-- with mixed results from my perspective (if not Marvel'$--$$)

Good= TOMB OF DRACULA #26 and 32

Bad= Some random reprint for which he did a new cover!

One name that none of you mentioned was DUSTIN NGUYEN.

I had'nt been reading super-hero comic books for a while and was instantly mesmerized by a cover he did for an issue of DETECTIVE COMICS--the Paul Dini writer's credit on the cover sealed the deal but I may have bought it anyway.

Also these guys:

BILL SIENKIWICZ

DAVE McKEAN

I used to buy comics for which they did the cover SPECIFICALLY so I could literally rip the cover off and keep for later framing and\or dry-mounting!

[An Ear In The Fireplace]

Up until around 1980, the covers made me want to buy the comic for what was inside them. Increasingly after 1980, the covers made me want to buy the comics for the covers--as usually they had little to do with the story inside.

[An Ear In The Fireplace]

To illustrate . . . a cover like this one for 'Tec 367 (one of my best loved comics of all time), had me breathless to read the story inside and I would not be disappointed . . .



. . . while a cover like this one had me wanting to buy Wonder Woman 72 just for the cover alone, even though I was long past caring about the stories inside WW . . .

[Shellhead]

Although I appreciate good covers, especially those exciting but often misleading silver age covers, I usually don't buy a comic just because of a good cover. Sometimes when a cover is exceptionally good, I might flip open the book to make sure that the cover artist is also the interior artist before buying.

That said, I did buy this Hulk comic only because I was impressed by the Gary Frank cover:



And I'm not even a big Gary Frank fan. I think his artwork is pretty good, but sometimes marred by extreme facial expressions.

[verslibre]

And I'm not even a big Gary Frank fan. I think his artwork is pretty good, but sometimes marred by extreme facial expressions.

Gary did a fantastic job on the recent Batman: Earth One graphic novel.

Nice Hulk cover, too.

[Scott Harris]

The only title I have considered buying in recent years due solely to the covers is J.H. Williams' run on Detective Comics.






I am always a big fan of covers with very strong design elements. Hence maybe my favorite cover artist ever... [to be continued in another post where I can actually post more scans]

[tony ingram]

Brian Bolland. No question.

[Scott Harris]

...Mike Grell

[hondobrode]

Art Adams definitely

[Polar Bear]

George Perez:

I'm with him.

[An Ear In The Fireplace]

The thing is with buying comics just for their covers, it doesn't seem worth it anymore, because you can look at them on the internet. And actually that's better, because if I buy the physical comics, they just go into boxes where I might never look at them again. But I can look at them all the time on the internet. So it hardly seems worth it to pay four dollars just for a cover.

[The Confessor]

Although a fair few of my favourite cover artists have been listed in this thread already (Bolland, Ross, Steranko etc), I don't think I usually buy a comic just for the cover. I mean, yes, the cover is an important factor in making me want to pick up a book (especially back in the day, when I only had limited pocket money to spend on comics), but even the best cover in the world wouldn't have made me pick up a Thor comic (I had no interest in Thor as a kid and, truth be told, still don't really). So, yeah...I'm not really all that swayed by covers I suppose.