Logo: Go/No-go.

GO: COMEBACK Sci-Fi/Crime mini series Comeback is another recent...

hellomuller — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 17:12:00 +0000

GO: COMEBACK

Sci-Fi/Crime mini series Comeback is another recent Image Comics title that, like Nowhere Men, takes its cover design from the 20th Century pulp era, especially reminiscent in places of Saul Bass’ film title work. The recurring fragmentation device works well within the context of the story and it creates a strong cohesive look across issues. The logo itself is the weakest aspect on the cover. While its very neutral and – thankfully – devoid of cheap effects and renderings its neither here or there, trying to incorporate two hooks: the looping dots and flipping half of the word to reinforce the message, where one would have been more than enough — and would have allowed for a more interesting masthead.

GO: SNAPSHOT Snapshot is the first new creator-owned series by...

hellomuller — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:45:40 +0000

GO: SNAPSHOT

Snapshot is the first new creator-owned series by Andy Diggle and Jock (of The Losers fame). The all black & white cover (the book is in B&W by the way) is, what you could call a typical (and I mean that in the best sense of the word) Jock cover where the artwork walks the thin line between illustration and a very deliberately executed design composition that constructs an iconic image. The only negative I can think of, is that the logo design is very similar to the logo for Scalped, another series where Jock was responsible for the cover and logo.
But, the design fits the book like a glove — and the consistency in style and approach helps the book’s recognizability on the shelves.

NO GO: Dark Universe and Eartha Kitt: Femme Fatale To be honest,...

hellomuller — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:27:50 +0000

NO GO: Dark Universe and Eartha Kitt: Femme Fatale

To be honest, I could have picked any Bluewater comic for this review, but these two stood out for the glaring contrast between the design and the subject matter. First, we have Dark Universe, based on the works by William F. Nolan (who also wrote Logan’s Run). What is supposed to be a sic-fi/horror title has a logo design that has absolutely no relevance with the contents, not to mention that its faux marker felt/grunge treatment is badly executed — as is the top lockup. Surely a bit more consideration on placement wouldn’t have been out of place here — whereas Earth Kitt sits a bit better on the page, the logo is trying to pull of two moods that don’t work well. The overly cartoonish rendering of Eartha Kitt fits the artwork well enough, but the choice of running “Femme Fatale” in an extremely cursive decorative font breaks up any sense of unity that was going on in the first place. Its does’t connect with the name, and is nigh illegible from a distance. This title could have benefitted from a more confident push into full cartoon/pulp rendering to do it justice.

GO: Young Avengers #1 To be fair I’m not the biggest fan...

hellomuller — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 11:32:00 +0000

GO: Young Avengers #1

To be fair I’m not the biggest fan of the Young Avengers logo — or the Avengers logo for that matter. Its not bad — the A icon works very well — but there are some letter shapes that can work better (the curves on the G and S for example), and there are a few balance issues. However, the cover design takes all the strong points of the logo — the forward angle that gives the logo its momentum — and uses it as the grid for a great cover mosaic. I’m sure this type of layout is a one-off for the first issue, but its a great start by a fantastic creative team.

No question just happy you're posting these again. It's like a Christmas treat. Thank you!

hellomuller — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 16:46:47 +0000

Thanks, glad you like the blog!

GO: THE BLACK BEETLE — NIGHT SHIFT The Black Beetle is Francesco...

hellomuller — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 15:17:25 +0000

GO: THE BLACK BEETLE — NIGHT SHIFT

The Black Beetle is Francesco Francavilla’s love letter to the pulp fiction serials of the 30s and 40s. Francavilla is pulling out all the stops to really capture the finer points of the pulp design language, both for the cover designs and the related promo material to create a fully realised design language that is flexible but immediately recognisable.

GO: WHERE IS JAKE ELLIS The cover designs of the first volume of...

hellomuller — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 13:09:11 +0000

Where Is Jake Ellis #1

Where Is Jake Ellis #2

GO: WHERE IS JAKE ELLIS

The cover designs of the first volume of Jake Ellis (“Who is Jake Ellis”) where firmly rooted in 60s espionage/action movie genre. For this 2nd volume, the covers are an altogether much modern and cold affair, with giant outlined text overlaying tightly cropped closeup of the protagonists. Equally rooted in a design that echoes its spy/pulp roots. The high contrast makes sure you’re equally pulled in by the title and art.

My only extremely tiny comment would be that I can tell the outline stroke is sitting on the outside of the type, making the edges slightly rounded instead of sharp. But thats just me.

NO GO: ANTI The first time I glanced at this cover I read the...

hellomuller — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 12:59:43 +0000

NO GO: ANTI

The first time I glanced at this cover I read the title as ANI or ANT. Only on closer inspection I realised the sword stands in for the T — and while its nothing new to swap a letter for an object related to the story (think Sporanos), the Anti logo is just too ornate for it to work. The logo itself is too detailed to really separate itself from the artwork, whilst the sword is too strong a departure from the neighbouring letters so it doesn’t read as one fluent word.

GO: SPAWN cover homages I’ve always been a fan of...

hellomuller — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 12:35:00 +0000

Spawn #227 cover referencing The Amazing Spider-Man #300

Spawn #221 cover referencing Amazing Fantasy #15

Spawn #226 cover referencing The Incredible Hulk #340

Spawn #220 cover referencing The Savage Dragon #1

Spawn #220 cover referencing Youngblood #1

Spawn #224 cover referencing The Dark Knight Returns #2

Spawn #222 cover referencing The Walking Dead #1

GO: SPAWN cover homages

I’ve always been a fan of well-executed cover homages, a staple of comic culture where artists will redraw iconic covers (usually classic number 1 issues) as a hat-tip to the originators. The current run of Spawn covers are no exception. Where most homages usually limit themselves to referencing artwork, the Spawn team have paid attention to all the details, redrawing logos, corner boxes titles, strap lines and credits. A few of my favourites here.

A nice collection of sketches showing how art and design work...

hellomuller — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 10:53:02 +0000

A nice collection of sketches showing how art and design work together nicely, and a free form approach the use and interpretation of the logo.

xombiedirge:

New Avengers #1 Prelimary Covers by Jock

NO GO: HAPPY The only reason this is a no-go for me is that,...

hellomuller — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 02:27:00 +0000

NO GO: HAPPY

The only reason this is a no-go for me is that, whilst the cover is perfectly fine (in that it does the job of showing you the title without too much superfluous elements), it looks exactly like a MillarWorld book if it weren’t for Grant Morrison’s name above the title.
When one creator brands his books in a consistent manner (and colour scheme), the last thing you should do is emulate it. Unless this is a very clever ploy to confuse readers and buy into the Millar hype.

UPDATE — GO: NOWHERE MEN #1 COVER I wrote about Nowhere Men 2...

hellomuller — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 17:34:21 +0000

Nowhere Men #1 regular wraparound cover

Nowhere Men #1 Thought Bubble cover

UPDATE — GO: NOWHERE MEN #1 COVER

I wrote about Nowhere Men 2 posts down, but just discovered two things: a) the covers are designed by Fonografiks, and b) the actual cover for issue 1 is a wraparound design homage to Lawrence Ratzkin’s jacket design for “The Beatles: The Authorized Biography” by Hunter Davies. The 2nd image is an variant design released for the Thought Bubble comic convention.

Another great example of comics looking out from their walled garden at music design/packaging (see also Rian Hughes’ great Ghost Box inspired Iron Man covers).

GO: Multiple Warheads #2 Brilliant piece of collage/found image...

hellomuller — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 17:04:00 +0000

GO: Multiple Warheads #2

Brilliant piece of collage/found image based cover design by writer/artist Brandon Graham for his Multiple Warheads series where he scanned a page out of a discarded Chinese calendar, then adding his own art to it.

GO: Nowhere Men I might be jumping ahead here as the book...

hellomuller — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 12:58:42 +0000

GO: Nowhere Men

I might be jumping ahead here as the book hasn’t been released yet, but this — what I assume is the cover for the first issue — looks incredibly promising. The promo material I’ve seen so far for this series is dressed in a very modern, minimal design reminiscent of Segura’s The Filth covers and, obviously, American Modernism. Not a bad thing at all. Its an interesting, if slightly off-balance logo lockup, and personally I would have done more with the typography instead of just setting it in Helvetica Neue 75 because its easy to make something look good without too much effort — but nonetheless its quite refreshing to see something this unapologetic on a cover.

GO: INJURY Comic covers as gig posters is the best analogy I can...

hellomuller — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 12:51:14 +0000

GO: INJURY

Comic covers as gig posters is the best analogy I can come up with here. Only four issues in total, and each cover has a very distinct look and design. Great use of colour, custom type and layout.

GO: Black Dynamite As far as design references go, the cover for...

hellomuller — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 12:38:35 +0000

GO: Black Dynamite

As far as design references go, the cover for the Black Dynamite comic can do nothing wrong in my eyes. Its incredibly difficult to do a proper pastiche or retro design using current tools: more often than not the design gets clouded by a idealised/stylised idea of what we think it should look like. Usually this translates in using too many period fonts, and ravaging the design with faux dust and paper creases, which is luckily kept to an absolute minimum here.

GO: Marvel NOW! I’ve been holding off on writing about...

hellomuller — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:47:39 +0000

X-Force & Uncanny Avengers covers

Deadpool & Guardians of the Galaxy covers

Fantastic Four & FF covers

HULK & Iron Man covers

X-Men covers

Thunderbolts & Thor covers

Captain America & Superior Spider-Man covers

Avengers Arena covers

Avengers covers

GO: Marvel NOW!

I’ve been holding off on writing about Marvel’s big reboot because cover previews were coming through at a very sporadic rate making it difficult to get a grasp on the bigger picture. I’m sure that as of writing this we still haven’t seen the last of them either, but at least I can form more of an opinion on it NOW. Before I dive into this, two things: Initially I was planning to split the covers in a Go and No-go post, but, looking at all the covers together I couldn’t really find any glaring faults that would warrant that, personal preferences aside. Hence a catch-all ‘Go’ review if you will. Secondly, because Tumblr only allows 10 images in a photo set I can’t show every single NOW cover, so I’m focussing on the ones I believe are the most interesting — good and/or bad.

Three months ago I wrote about the Uncanny Avengers logo, and while giving that logo a negative review, I’m glad to see a new version of it gracing the covers. Albeit still flawed in places (some very weird angles and curves on the letters G and S in particular) its a vast improvement on the initial design.

Generally speaking, I’m giving the redesigns a thumbs up. Most logos are typographically strong, but suffer from FX overload. I don’t think the Iron Man logo will ever escape bevels and metallic effects for long, while The Hulk logo will forever equally look like a bad case of filter overload. Style wise, there’s little consistency across the titles. While some logos clearly belong to the 90s — The Fantastic Four could be a Heroes Reborn title for all I know, others clearly lean towards 60s pulp fiction (FF, and most of the X-titles) filtered through cartoons and contemporary design sensibilities. I like the Captain America logo in particular because of its graphic simplicity, keeping the typography close to the 40s logo. Even titles like Deadpool and Guardian of the Galaxy, while really playing up to expected tropes work for some reason, even though its not to my personal taste. The weaker ones of the bunch would be Thor and Thunderbolts. Both fall victim to too much effect treatments (Thunderbolts in particular I’d say), and it would have been nice to see an updated take on the Thor logo.

Standouts for me at the moment are the (New) Avengers, and recently unveiled Superior Spider-Man logos. Both very different in design, but both extremely effective. The almost monolithic A is — especially after the film — all the book needs, and the dirty, stringy, web-like treatment of the Superior Spider-Man is a really clever update from the decades old webbing device.

Another interesting contender is Avengers Arena, who thanks to Dave Johnson’s striking design for issue 1 are pushed into genre homages of thematically linked (pop) culture references like Battle Royale and Lord Of The Flies. While this works for the first issue, the BR style bullet feels out of place on the 2nd issue, and it would have been nice to see an approach similar to Warren Ellis’ Planetary, where the logo design adapts to the cover art and theme.

Objectively speaking, I can’t really find any glaring faults with the logos. Some are very modern and fresh takes on old ideas, while some almost deliberately become a pastiche of themselves, if only they would use less superfluous effects.

One of the things that I’ve been going back and forth on is if it would have been necessary to have more uniformity across the line. Yet again we get a series of relaunched titles sporting a new logo. Nothing new there. Thematically some are grouped (your X-Men titles, Fantastic Four family, Avengers etc) so there are some loose secondary tenuous links: try to find a connection between X-Men, Uncanny Avengers and X-Force for example. One could argue that a company-wide treatment for titles would be a very good thing, especially in terms of brand building — but in doing so you wipe decades old heritage off the table, not to mention the individual voices those books have built over the years. Looking back at DC’s New 52, you can see the same problems. The Marvel NOW! push isn’t a total breath of fresh air, but there are some very interesting things happening here and there — hopefully a sign of things to come.

NO GO: Amazing Spider-Man 700 I’m torn here, because...

hellomuller — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 08:28:53 +0100

NO GO: Amazing Spider-Man 700

I’m torn here, because conceptually there’s a great cover hidden here. To celebrate the milestone 700th (!) issue of the series, the cover displays the names of all the creative teams (artists & writers) who have contributed to the series. A great idea, even though the idea of a word (or tag cloud) isn’t new — executed correctly a text-driven cover can have great impact. Instead we get, as far as I can guess, an artist who delivers a solid cover and in post production the names get wedged into the cityscape silhouette. Far from ideal. With some time and extra care the names could have formed the buildings — actually, I don’t think it needed the NYC skyline at all (every fan and regular reader knows it as the default story location anyway). The designer had to make do with the art he got, and as a result we get a very gap-tooth layout where form awkwardly follows function.

TERMINATOR POSTER COMPETITION

hellomuller — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:01:43 +0100

TERMINATOR POSTER COMPETITION :

Another short detour from comics (kind of), but I’m running a T2 poster competition and I’m giving away some limited edition comic goodies!

hellomuller:

HELLOMULLER TERMINATOR 2 poster competition!

As a thank you to the fans for the support, we’ve put together an awesome giveaway for everyone who buys (and has bought) a helloMuller T2 poster.

Seeing you featuring IRON MAN #525 and how bad it is reminds me of the brief moment Rian Hughes was designing that same series' covers in 2009/2010. So sad.

hellomuller — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 20:35:56 +0100

I also remember my failed attempts at pushing through a non-metallic logo…