New Brevoort Formspring

It’s always funny to hear these sorts of complaints, because I’m old enough to remember when all of the fans hated word balloons on the covers because they felt that they made the books look too childish. Also, it feels a little bit like you’ve not really been looking at our covers lately when you describe them as just being generic pin-up character poses without backgrounds or story context. Sure, some covers we do might fit that mold, but not all of them, and nowhere near most of them. I happen to think that we’ve been doing some excellent covers of late–not on every single book, but on a lot of them–but like so much else, this is somewhat a matter of personal taste. Also, there’s no way to go back to the way things were when you were a kid first coming into the hobby–the world has changed, the audience has changed, and even the distribution has changed. That would be as crazy as deciding that the secret to better television ratings would be to broadcast in black and white, because when the programs were B & W they got better ratings–that analysis ignores an awful lot of information in order to reach that conclusion, you know? That all said, we did word balloons and cover copy and a story-based situation on the cover of FF #7 this past month (a homage to an old John Buscema cover.) And I’m willing to bet that we don’t sell markedly any more or fewer issues than we did of the previous month’s issue.