Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Gil Kane Cover of the Month: Supernatural Thrillers #9

Kane produced many well regarded superhero covers for Marvel during the 1970s, but many of my favourites were in other genres. The cover to Supernatural Thrillers #9 is no exception. It is a beautifully designed cover, with some nice attention to detail. We've had a bit of a discussion about Al Milgrom's inking over at Comic Book Resources, but I think he does a great job here - adding some depth to the image. I like Kane serving as his own inker, but he sometimes went with too fine a line in the 70s. Of course, this type of half-submerged cover is all about the lighting effects, and I'm not sure who colored this cover, but they did a terrific job. As it stands, Kane's half-submerged cover is right up there with the best of Bill Everett and Lee Elias. Like many Marvel covers, this one is hurt by the captions.

4 comments:

craig/benday-dot said...

Nice one Scott. That's the best cover of the series, and I picked it up in the first place because I loved it so much. I love those squat looking and very diagonal Gil Kane poses. Yellow appeared a lot in the background of covers on Marvel bronze age comics. A very effective shade, surprisingly enough, for such a sunny colour, to grace the horror books. Good one to feature!

Matt Bird said...

Jesus, that's a beautiful cover!

gef the talking mongoose said...

I'm actually not much of a fan of most of Kane's '70s covers, but this is definitely an exception. (It probably doesn't hurt that Val Mayerik's interior art made "The Living Mummy" a particular favorite of mine at the time.)

Schoonaert said...

Thanks to your recommendation I picked this book up at my local shop's anniversary sale.