MIKE GOLD: My All-Time Favorite Comic Book Cover
They don’t draw comic book covers like this any more. And, well, that might be a good thing.
These days, we’re in a phase where covers are particularly boring. When it comes to the great American staple, the heroic fantasy comic, most are over art directed and too posh for their own good. Few actually have anything to do with the story inside; they are simply generic poster shots. When I stare at the big Wall-O-Comics at most shops, my eyes quickly glaze over. They generate little enthusiasm and manage to completely ignore the sense of wonder that makes comics magic. At best, I walk away from the Wall thinking “gee, that Captain America cover sure would make a swell statue.”
Yes, I still use the word “swell.” I’m trying to bring it back.
Look at a few of the really great covers. If you’re at all interested in the genre, how can you pass ‘em up? They are exciting, intriguing and most of all, they appeal to the sense of wonder.
Yeah, they’re all ancient. But don’t try to tell me they’re childish. Putting on a mask and fighting crime and/or evil as the result of some event that wouldn’t even cut it in Greek tragedy is childish. We’re simply negotiating the price.
However, some covers were simply wonderfully absurd. They are so far over the top you’ve just got to check them out. In fact, there are so many of them that there’s an entire website devoted to the topic, run by cartoonist Scott Shaw!. It’s called Oddball Comics and you’ve got to check it out. He’s got about a trillion such covers there. But I don’t know if he’s got my all-time favorite comic book cover.
Here’s a new picture of Harrison Ford and his on-screen son Shia Labeouf from next May’s unnamed fourth installment of the Indiana Jones franchise (working title: Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods). From the looks of it, the story seems to take place in the late 50s/early 60s and gives us an old and very gray Dr. Henry Jones Jr.
Jane Jewell, Executive Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, 
IÂ’m spoiled already. Seven weeks into this column, and I yawn when I see a DVD with Âonly one audio commentary. It wasn’Ât even seven weeks when I succumbed to the ÂCriticÂs Disease, judging each new entertainment against the one I had seen the day, week, month, or year before.
So now I feel I could have been a bit more adamant about the editionÂs charms, especially with this siteÂs readers. Maybe I should have mentioned that the extras come in two categories: the film, and the comic book. And it is in this latter category where the glory of this version truly lies. There are new, lovingly created docs Âeach more than an hour long  on the history of the comic from the 1960Âs until today, and on co-creator/artist supreme Jack Kirby.
I thought it would be pretty darn polite if we created a weekly spot here at ComicMix where we could post the links and contacts for some of the things we cover during the week in our trice-weekly Big ComicMix Broadcasts. Let’s jump right on what went down over the last few days:
America’s First Super Patriot. You can see more & even order issues 
It was great taking with all three creative partners in 12 Gauge Comics’ Occult Crimes Task Force. The Trade pb of the first series is out in stores now, but you can see a lot more on the 12 Gauge Website 
My home-base city of Fort Worth, Texas, has since the 1950s, complicated its countrified essence with a set of class-and-culture bearings that range from the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition – America’s “So, there!” riposte to Khruschev and/or Tchaikowsky, dating from a peak-period of the Cold War – to four heavy-duty art museums of international appeal and influence. The local-boosterism flacks crow about “Cowboys ’n’ Culture!” at every opportunity, with or without provocation. But apart from the self-evident truths that Old Money (oil ’n’ cattle) fuels the high-cultural impulse and that the cow-honker sector finds chronic solace in the Amon Carter and Sid Richardson museums’ arrays of works by Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, these communities seldom cross paths with one another.
