Thursday, June 26, 2008

Did anyone notice....

... that the cover to the latest trade paperback changed from what was solicited?

As solicited, and shown on Amazon right now:



As on the DC Comics page, which still reads "Cover by Neal Adams":



(via the DC Archives Message Board)

The title is different, too. It was solicited as "1050 Years in the Future" but it came out as "1050 Years of the Future" which actually makes more sense. Too bad nobody updated the DC page for either the cover artist or the title.

The Neal Adams original came from the 1976 DC Calendar (also seen, cropped, as the cover to a 1977 reprint paperback from Tempo Books), while the Grell original came from the Limited Collector's Edition #C-49, which reprinted the 2-parter of the Legion vs Mordru (and was also seen, redrawn, on the cover to Archives vol. 12).

In a kind of reverse Déjà Vu, this kind of cover swap was also seen last fall.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does anyone know why the cover was changed? I mean I know Neal Adams is late with his artwork a lot, but come on, this was done back in 1976. I am a big Neal Adams fan and would really have preferred the cover using his artwork.

gorjus said...

The latter is the one that's at my Books-a-Million. Are there multiple covers for different markets, a la Marvel's recent policy?

Michael said...

Only thing I can think of is reprint rights and/or payment. Maybe it would cost too much for the Adams cover or something. The Grell cover is what I saw in my shop too.

Jim Drew said...

It's obvious to me that the solicited cover was a prototype of sort. There's no text treatment, they reduced the number of background covers from 25 to 16 (to make them all more visible, and maybe to better reflect the contents, at least in page count). The original gives a better sense of "Legion", but maybe doesn't make for as good of a cover.

Reboot said...

Actually, the original listing for 1050, as part of the "DC Collections for (several months)" bit was for "Of the Future". The solicit listing as "In the Future" was afterward.