I stumbled across a minor, but curious, mystery a little while ago and for some resaon started thinking of it again last night. Here are the covers for Fantastic Four #135, 136 and 137...
And here are the covers for some French-language Canadian reprints that came out about two months after the originals...
Most of the covers of the reprint series are lifted from the original comics, with just the English translated into French. But for some reason, the issue reprinting Fantastic Four #136 doesn't use the original cover art, but a panel of interior art.
Now it's certainly possible the original cover art was lost or destroyed. But here's the cover to a British reprint of the same story from about four years later...It's been modified a bit to accomodate a slightly wider format, but there was clearly some form of reproducible art still around.
Or was there?
On closer study, The Complete Fantastic Four cover might in fact an entirely new piece of art, recreated based on the original. The more you look at the two, the more discrepancies to see: Medusa's left boot, the Torch's flame aura, the placement of Thing's left hand, the number of steps on that dais, the placement of the upper bike rider... There are more issues there than would be touched up for the size difference. Which leads one to think that the actual cover art for FF #136 was lost in the mail, and John Buscema recreated it based on a printed version.
But then again, most of the differences are either in placement or details near the edge. So was this then a heavy re-cut/paste job with a few touch-ups at the edges? It wouldn't be the first time Marvel put a fair amount of time and effort into heavily retouching some cover art for arguably inconsequential changes.
And, in doing some further research, The Complete Fantastic Four issue is an anomoly. Other foreign reprints -- some coming later still -- use the original art...
So if the original cover art was still around (or at least some version of it that could be used in production) there's a fair case to be made that The Complete Fantastic Four version was NOT a re-creation. But it still seems like a heck of a lot of production work just to get the art to fit a slightly different format. It probably would have been faster, and possibly cheaper, to just have Buscema draw a new one.
Getting back to the Canadian cover, it makes sense that if Marvel sent the art up to Canada for that reprint and the cover art was somehow lost or damaged, and they had to scrounge for something quickly. Depending on when in their printing process the cover are became unusable, it might make sense to just grab the nearest available art that would fill most of a cover -- the opening splash page.
But, why the strange treatment? Why the odd angle? Why the red border? Why color some of the figures, but not the Human Torch? And why color the figures with the least intense color of the three chosen? Questions I do not have even speculative answers for. Nothing in my graphic design background can figure out how they arrived at any of their decisions here, aside from, "Hey, what's the biggest piece of art we have that we can use for a cover?"
There just seem to be a number of weird (and admittedly inconsequential) questions around this cover.
Marvel announced yesterday they'll be publishing a book collecting over 700 covers of Fantastic Four as part of the 65th anniversary of that title. They're going with the descriptive, if unimaginative, title Fantastic Four: 65 Years of the World’s Greatest Comic Covers!
This won't be the first time Marvel's celebrated an FF anniversary with a cover collection. The "Director's Cut" edition of Fantastic Four #500 from back in 2003 ran a multi-page 'collage' of all of the covers up until that point. And, if you look at the credits of that issue, you'll find my name as the person who provided them. So it's got me wondering if they'll use my scans for this new issue as well.
It would be pretty cool if they did, but I suspect they won't. When I provided the scans back in 2003, that was prior to Marvel's digital program.
The so-called "golden age of reprints" was just getting underway, so much of their library hadn't seen print since it had first been published; the original production art would've been long since gotten rid of and new scans of everything wouldn't have been made yet.
They would've only had scans for maybe whatever had been re-published traditionally via, say, their Masterworks books, but that would've only covered maybe the first 60 issues of the title. I had been running a major FF fan site for several years at that point, and had talked with editor Tom Brevoort more than a couple times, so he thought to reach out to me to get a hold of the remaining cover scans fairly quickly. They weren't professional-grade scans but, if you look at the issue, they're reprinted as thumbnails, so even a poor quality scan would've been 'hidden' by the small size.
Of course, that was over two decades ago now. Marvel has since released every single issue digitally, which means that they've professionally scanned and cleaned up not only the covers but all the interiors as well. So I suspect they'll just use the cleaned up versions from those releases. Since they're doing a full book of covers, I expect they'll be considerably larger than the thumbnails used in #500 and they'll want to rely on the best sources available. Otherwise, a book of thumbnails the size of the ones they used in #500 would only be five pages!
On the off chance they happen to use my old scans, there should be a pretty easy 'tell.' All of the scans I provided were from my personal collection, and several of the issues had been signed by the creators. In the instances where a creator signed the cover, you could still see their signature in the reproduction in #500. But only if you know what to look for -- again, they're all thumbnails, so the signatures barely even register as a dark squiggle. I can go through my collection again now, and see what issues I have signed, but I honestly don't recall which ones I would've had signed back then. I'm pretty certain I had a few issues signed by Len Wein, and I think Marv Wolfman and Paul Ryan. Maaaaaybe Keith Pollard? I think all the other creator signatures I have on FF issues came later.
In any event, if you look at their new covers issue and there happen to be a few scans that include creator signatures, that's where they came from!
