So have you heard about this yet? As if relaunching the Ultimate line, and relaunching it at a more expensive price point, weren’t anathema enough to the original conception of the line as the low threshold, starter comics for new readers that don’t do all the dumb things that the past decade’s worth of superhero comics did, yesterday Marvel announced that the first issues of the new Ultimate line would have something called  “Foliogram” covers. If you’re not going to click on the link, here’s a snippet from Marvel’s press release:

Part foil, part hologram, these reflective covers will jump at you from shelves! Watch as Spider-Man’s webbing catches the light! Examine the intricate technology of Tony Stark! And, yes, that’s Captain America’s shield shining back at you!

“This is Marvel doing the nineties right,” explained David Gabriel, Marvel Comics Senior Vice President of Sales & Circulation. “We’re taking two of the most popular cover treatments of all time—foil and holograms—to create an all new kind of cover, as a ‘thank-you’ to fans who’ve been demanding this kind of variant! Retailers and fans don’t need to worry. We’re only doing this on a limited basis. You won’t see one on Ms Marvel #46 or Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers #4. We’re using them to mark very special occasions…such as the launch of Ultimate Comics line.”

People have been demanding this kind of variant? Really? Who are you, people who demanded Foliogram covers? Stand up, raise your hands, so we can heap scorn on you.

After reading the news, shaking my head sadly and sighing over and over, I got to thinking about cover enhancements in general, and realized that though I started reading comics around 1991 or so, I didn’t actually have all that many of the crazier enhanced covers that the decade produced.

So I broke out the longboxes to see what  shameful examples of enhanced covers I had lurking in my own personal collection.

Meet me after the jump to find out!

The first enhanced cover I bought was Sandman Special #1, a pre-Vertigo Sandman comic from 1991 by Neil Gaiman, Bryan Talbot and Mark Buckingham. It was my first introduction to the character, and the jumping-on point at which I jumped on to what would end up being one of my all-time favorite comics (and, I think, one comics’ all-time most important series, given the way it helped bring the graphic novel into the world outside the comic shop on a more frequent basis).

It was a glow-in-the-dark cover, which is an “enhancement” I still think is genuinely cool. When you turned out the lights,  Dave McKean’s abstract-ish image of a man and woman—Orpheus and Eurydice?—on the cover above a jumble of words transforms into the glowing, abstracted face of Dream, while the glowing words “In dreams I walk with u” appeared. Provided you let the cover soak up enough light before turning off the light or taking it into a closet, anyway.

This gimmick was also used repeatedly during the 1992-1998 volume of The Spectre, by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, another favorite series of mine.

Here’s the cover of the first issue, which I’m afraid to take out of it’s polybag, lest I release a spirit of vengeance:

The giant skull made up of skeletons—with other skulls as its teeth!—would glow in the dark. The editors of the book really must have liked that trick, because they used it again on #8 and #13. This series is one I often see issues of in back-issue discount bins. I highly recommend looking it up if you missed it the first time around. The covers are almost all awesome, even the ones that don’t glow in the dark, as they were each done by different artists each month, and often featured cool images like, say, The Spectre riding a Tyrannosaurus Rex out of a nuclear explosion or riding a sled pulled by skeletal reindeer on his way to deliver a big sack of ironic murders or, in a personal favorite, a thunder-thighed, badly be-mulleted Superman squaring off against Spec…by Alex Ross!

But back to 1991—That was also the year of the second Chuck Dixon/Tom Lyle Robin miniseries, which was kind of special in that Chuck Dixon-written Robin stories were so rare at that point and that this Tim Drake kid had only just become Robin, the first new Robin since that Jason Todd punk no one except Judd Winick liked.

In this four-issue miniseries, Robin II: The Joker’s Wild, he would be going up against The Joker, the villain who killed his predecessor, for the first—and maybe last?!—time.

Obviously, that was quite a big deal, and big deals required quite special covers.

And what could be more special then, um, a “holographic” foil sticker awkwardly placed in an otherwise pretty nice piece of art by a pretty great artist?

For example, I’ve got two versions of #1 (the second I got in a $1 bin, I swear! And only because it was by Kelley Jones, who would later become a favorite artist!) One, by Matt Wagner, shows a straightjacketed Joker laughing on the floor of a padded room, while there’s an, um, glowing silvery poster of the new Robin hanging on the wall behind him? Some kind of radical new psychological theory about how to cure homicidal maniacs, I guess. In the other, Kelley Jones’ Batman is being all dramatic in the Batcave, while a computer monitor in the foreground hosts the sticker.

In subsequent issues, the stickers would be integrated iinto the art to appear in mirrors, or on the face of a thrown playing card or on a billboard or wherever. They’re all pretty lame.

These comics, by the way? They only cost $1.50 a piece. Wow.

Robin II was such a success that it necessitated a Robin III, this time a six-issue, biweekly miniseries, by the Dixon/Lyle team. And, of course, it required an even more ridiculously elaborate cover scheme.

How ridiculously elaborate?

So ridiculously elaborate that it required special instructions on how to operate the “special technology cover.”

The first issue, which came polybagged with a poster by Mike Zeck, had some kinda crazy cover with a window in it, and then you’d pull an insert out of it slowly, and it would make it look like Robin’s cape was fluttering as a camera panned past him or something. Then, if you flipped the insert over, you could do the same thing with the image of the KGBeast that was on the back of it.

I don’t really understand the appeal really, and I haven’t reread any of these since 1992, since they’re kind of a pain in the ass to deal with at all. I guess all six came in these polybagged with poster, crazy-cover-having varieties, but teenage Caleb apparently lost interest in the covers pretty quickly, as it looks like I have the first few issues of Robin III: Cry of the Huntress in the special $2.50 “collector’s set” format but the rest of the series I have in the $1.25 standard issue format.

(An aside: Tom Lyle drew awesome hair on Tim, didn’t he?)

The only other Batman comic I have with a special cover is 1993’s Batman #500, which was the last chapter of the 19-part “Knightfall” storyline in which they introduced the new Batman (not the new new Batman, the old new Batman).

At first it looked like your standard Batman swinging around on a bat-line cover…

…but then fold it over and—oh snap!

It’s the New New Look Batman, in his new X-Treme battle armor! And it’s all shiny with, like some kinda metallic ink or something…?

This cover was drawn by some young artist named… let’s see…Joe Quesada…? Oh yeah, I remember him! He drew the Batman: Sword of Azrael miniseries and The Ray miniseries. Whatever became of that guy…?

In the summer of 1992, I acquired what is probably my least favorite enhanced cover, that of Eclipso: The Darkness Within #1. It was a special one-shot kicking off that summer’s annuals, in which the heroes of the DC Universe would individually encounter Eclipso before all teaming up to fight him at the end of the summer.

Eclipso’s deal, if you don’t know, was that he had these special black diamonds with which he could possess people, if they happened to be holding them while thinking of vengeance. Like the Silver Age version of the character, he could shoot eyebeams out of one too.

The cover featured an actual black diamond—well, a plastic one—embedded right on the cover by some mysterious agency. (Probably magic. Or glue). I remember thinking it looked pretty cool in the shop, but when I got it home it began causing problems immediately. I couldn’t really stack other comics on top of it, as it wasn’t really flat because of the gem, and it’s an ill fit in a long box too.

Damn DC Comics, I thought, their enhanced cover is causing me no end of trouble! I wish I could get even with them for this! And then I heard a strange voice in my head and blacked out. The next thing I knew, I was in the lobby of  DC’s headquarters at 1325 Avenue of the America’s, being lead away by security guards.

I wasn’t much of a Marvel reader as a teenager, and wouldn’t even sample their more popular characters of the nineties like The Punisher and X-Men until Marvel hired Vertigo writers to take them over in the early ‘aughts, but one of my favorite enhanced covers is that of Wolverine #50.

It’s actually from my little brother’s collection, which I absorbed into my own longboxes when he grew out of Wolverine. In fact, I don’t think I ever actually got around to reading this thing, which is enetitled “Dreams of Gore: Phase 3” and was written by “Lethal Larry Hama,” drawn by “Murderous Marc Silvestri” and “Dangerous Dan Green,” and edited by “Brutal Bob Harras.” What does a brutally edited comic book read like? I kinda want to know now.

Anyway, I do love that cover.

It’s shaped like a manila folder marked “Top Secret” and “Weapon X File” and is even stamped “Priority Clearance Only Not To Be Seen By Major Logan.”

On the inside, there were, like, fake photos and suchlike, which were peeking through the cover, as it seems to have been torn by Wolverine’s own claws!

I imagine some mechanical process was responsible for the creation of this cover, but I like to imagine a bored, unhappy guy in the big printing press in the basement of Marvel’s HQ, wearing a set of Wolverine claws on one hand, and slashing the covers of Wolverine #50 as they slid down a conveyor belt past him all day long.

That accounts for my own meager collection of goofy covers from the ‘90s. What cover schemes, enhancements and special technologies do you guys remember fondly/not-so-fondly?

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