Client: Personal

 

With DC Comics’ Archive Editions entering their waning days, I took it upon myself to design one final update before their swansong.

 

As valuable as the series was - after all, we never would have had access to some of these old stories except in the format of the Archive Editions - the design and re-coloring of the original Archive Editions had always struck me as suffering a few problems. Using a number of books for examples, I made an attempt to correct what I perceived to be the series' primary areas for improvement.

 

Among other issues, I created an art-forward design, removed the awkward dustcovers, and brought creator credits and publishing dates to the forefront.

The Spectre Archives, volume 1, the first cover I mocked up. This solves my biggest pet peeves about the series:

 

Number one, the dustjacket is gone – because of the binding on these books, it was always almost impossible to read them with the dustjacket on. Dustjackets are pretty hoary anyway, a holdover to a different era in personal libraries and nothing more these days, to my mind, than a prosthetic effort at "class" and "respectability." Frankly, I enjoy hardcover books without dustcovers better than with. 

Number two, the pinstripes and triangle background are gone, replaced with an art-forward design – images from the volumes (ideally with a more realistic coloring job reminiscent of the source material, but that’s a whole other issue to address) occupy the cover, giving them the attention they deserve. No one’s buying this series because of the pinstripes, after all

 

Creator credits! Obviously, there would have to be a story-by-story extension of the creator credits inside the book's Table of Contents, and something would have to be done about books with more than, say, three creators, but I approach those on subsequent covers.

 

Superman Volumes 1 & 2 are presented to give an idea what multiple volumes in the same series may look like.

 

The Silver Age Flash Archives are mocked up to solve the problem of titles which require sub- or super-headings, in this case to distinguish the Silver Age Flash Archives from the Golden Age Flash Archives

 

Assorted front cover title badges to show different lineweights and placements of text for longer or more complicated titles.

 

One of the cover elements I wanted to correct on these books was the difficulty in figuring out what exactly was contained in what volume - online shopping doesn’t always include the back cover as a high-res image, so I moved the book contents to the cover to make them more obvious.

 

The Charlton Action Heroes Archive presents the challenge of having to represent the names of half a dozen creators in a space which only fits three - in this case, the creator with the greatest volume of contributions gets top billing, then down until there’s no more room. The Interior pages will further clarify the credits.

 

What to do in regards to creator credits in the case of this anthology title of Golden Age reprints? Well, no creator credits on the cover - there are dozens involved in this book, none really moreso than the other - so the only equal solution is to omit creator details on the cover and take care of it inside the book.

 

There’s nothing special about this cover, I’ve just always wanted an SSK volume…

 

What a complete bookshelf might resemble. Notice the distinctions between how Superman and Superman Starring in Action Comics might be sorted, compared to how Wonder Woman’s various titles are arranged, as alternative examples on possible approaches to cataloguing the volumes.

 

(With such a strictly formalist trade dress, there's still a little room for playfulness, such as with the Atom's singular volume...)