After three fairly lengthy installments, this week’s “Comics, Covered” is a collection of quick-hit items:

Jack of Fables #6-7

The December and January issues of Vertigo’s Jack of Fables bring something rare: a diptych that isn’t part of some elaborate alternate-cover scheme.

The covers, by Eisner Award-winning — and now World Fantasy Award-winning — artist James Jean, are more in keeping with his recent work on Fables than on the spin-off. For the first five issues of Jack of Fables, Jean employed warm, vibrant colors: reds and pinks and golds. But here, for the two-part “Jack Frost” story, he shifts to a cooler, more subdued palette: blues and grays, with spashes of pink — like a sunset reflecting on ice.

I particularly like how Jean, who’s always good at integrating a book’s logo into the cover art, transformed “Jack of Fables” into matching scrolls to bookend the diptych. The vines — beanstalks? — are a nice touch, too.

Phonogram #3 and Oasis’ Definitely Maybe

I have a confession to make: I haven’t been reading Kieron Gillon and Jamie McKelvie’s Image miniseries, Phonogram.

It wasn’t an intentional snub; the whole “Music is Magic”/”urban-pop-obssessive magicians” thing is right up my alley. But I overlooked Issue 1 while putting together my monthly preorder list, and just never got back on the bus.

I feel bad about it, I do.

However, I’ve been following McKelvie’s covers in the monthly Image solicitations. I wasn’t crazy about the cover for the first issue, but all the ones since have really made me take notice.

The latest, for Issue 3 (which comes out tomorrow), caught my attention in part out of musical nostalgia: It’s an homage to, or maybe a reinterpretation of, Oasis’ 1994 debut album, Definitely Maybe.

I like the sense that time has passed between the two images, an not necessarily for the better. Plants have died, the windows are boarded up. Someone’s been murdered — perhaps in the fight that broke the picture frame, the television and the guitar.

Heck, even the person in the picture leaning against the sofa has grown old — and grown a beard.

It’s a nice use of album cover as a cultural reference point; a pop-music artifact (even if it’s barely a decade old).

Comics, Covered archives (or, links-a-go-go)

I’d planned to include links to some of the entries at the old “Comics, Covered” blog at the end of my first installment, but I rambled too long about Steranko and the SHIELD covers.

So here’s as good of a place as any point out some of the older items:

“Lone Cat and kitten?”: Adam Hughes’ cover to Catwoman #57 as an ode to Lone Wolf and Cub

“Candid camera”: The cover of Runaways #18 as a snapshot

“Money changes everything”: Kristian Donaldson’s Supermarket covers

“Something old, something nouveau”: The new Rex Mundi logo

“Placebo effect”: The cover of Tomer Hanuka’s The Placebo Man

“Cosmic thing”: The cover of GØDLAND #12

“Of mice and … mice”: The cover of Mouse Guard #2

“Earthtone trilogy”: The covers of 100 Bullets #73, Secret Six #2 and Checkmate #3

“But do you have anything by John Grisham?”: The Civil War trade dress

“Comrade Steel, the people’s hero”: The cover of 52 Week 8 as an ode to Soviet propaganda posters

“Lip service”: The cover to American Virgin #1

“Body language”: The cover to The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Vol. 1

Next week: Something about crime comics, I think.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Art and Design, Comics, Covered. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.