Entry 275: The Covers of Infinity Gauntlet.

The cover for Infinity Gauntlet #1 was never intended to be a cover. It was early on in the conceptual stages of the story when my editor at Marvel told me that they needed an image for promotional purposes. I had drawn some concept drawings but the story was still just an idea and hadn't been worked out. For instance, I knew Star Lord would be in it but I wasn't sure what role he would play. I also hadn't thought of including the dog. I didn't even know that this story would be set in Battle World or even what Battle World was. This is evident in my use of stars and planets on the cover. I had originally conceived the story as a space adventure.

Because this fist cover was created as a promotional image for the whole series, it doesn't serve as an appropriate cover for issue #1. But it should make a very appropriate cover for the collected edition. Since they often use the issue 1 covers as the covers for the collections, this seems almost like it was planned.

The cover of issue #2 might also seem like a mislead. But, just like the scene it represents in the issue, it is me trying to show the reader the things to come. To me, covers are a part of the storytelling. I knew that the reader would be seeing the cover of issue 2 at the end of issue 1, and if they had any doubts about where this series was going, I wanted to show them a little bit of what I had planned.

Issue 3 might be my favorite cover of the bunch. Once again I was thinking very much about what the reader would see at the end of issue 2. This image is a little bit of a curveball. I wanted to create something intriguing. My hope was that the reader would wonder why Thanos is with the family, where is the mom, and why is grandpa alive? This isn't a literal scene from the issue, but it represents the most important story element very well, I think.

In a way, issue 3 has a great deal of story but it only teases at actual action. Lots of so called action comics have no action and most readers don't seem to care, but I purposely wanted to create a sense that action might break out. Several times in issue 3 I build to what might become an action scene but then stop it from happening. My hope was to create a desire for action because that's what issue 4 would be. So at the end of issue 3 the reader would see the cover for 4 and hopefully really want what's in that comic to actually be what it's showing.

The cover to issue 4 is one of the classic super hero cover types to me. It's the big chaotic battle cover where you have a lot of characters all fighting. There are a lot of examples of tis kind of cover but the ones I think of are the ones by Jim Lee like X-Men #3 and WildC.A.T.S. #3.

With the cover of issue 5 I'm kind of doing what I did on the cover of issue 3 in that this isn't a literal scene, though I do think this cover represents what's at the core of this issue.

After issue 4 I wanted this cover to say that Anwen IS the main character of this series, in case the reader thought I had forgotten that.

One last thing I'll point out. -- Making the characters in Infinity Gauntlet black wasn't dictated by Marvel. It wasn't a marketing gimmick or part of a corporate attempt to appeal to an audience. So, being very aware of how people might view it as that, I tried to keep the covers from feeling like I was being exploitive, as if the book having a black family was the selling point. I hope it's clear that I'm trying to make covers that hopefully present an interesting story and fun art as the selling points.

To see literally all the covers I've ever done, check out my cover gallery here:
Cover Gallery

Also, I recently created a new gallery section for sequential pages. I have pages from almost every comic I've ever worked on. So check that out here:
Interior Page Gallery.

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