Thread by @KurtBusiek

How changes in coloring, cropping and trade dress can affect a cover.

There are things the first cover does better than the second — the ground is better, and that “Western ACTION” caption works better red than green — but mostly, the second cover stands out much more.

The sky blue in the second one helps the figures and text pop much more, and that brown caption against a purple sky in the first is a crime. The muted grays in the green and orange on Hardin in the first cover muddy him up; the second one has more impact.

The white gloves and gun hilts in the second one make them more noticeable, too, as does calling out Kid Colt’s spurs by not making them brown.

It’s interesting to note that in the first one, the colorist knocked out the background buildings in gray but colored the townspeople (unfortunately, a lot of them are colored in tones that make them vanish against the grays) and the second one knocks out the townspeople but...

…varies the building colors. In both cases, they’re trying to avoid visual clutter— to let you register the setting but keep your eye on the leads. They just go about it in different ways.

The trade dress (logos, etc.) on the second one take up more room, but the figures still manage to look bigger, thanks to the crisper coloring and a slight shift in how the art is cropped.

None of this is to say that comics covers should necessarily be brighter, simpler, more vivid — but it’s all about value contrasts, treatment of space and what the eye is drawn to.

Coloring is the part of comics-making I know the least about, though, so if any colorists...

…want to weigh in with observations or to point out stuff I’m missing or just wrong about, please feel free!

Oh, hey, I’ll also point out that the first cover emphasizes Wes Hardin’s legs and feet and muddies up his vest, where the guns are, so I look at him and think “highwater pants!” rather than “guns!” The second one mutes the legs by lessening contrast and color variation...

…and calls attention to the vest and the guns.

A couple more thoughts on this, since people are saying they like the moodiness of the original coloring, which is perfectly valid.

The purple in the sky isn’t a problem, though with that much red in the purple I’d look for something other than red for the logo dropshadow.

The two issues I have with the purple sky aren’t the purple itself, it’s that they put a brown caption up against dark purple (lotta red in the brown, lotta red in the purple, no pop). And that the transition from purple to blue happens where it does.

By having that transition happen along the horizontal area between the thought balloon and the hat, the hat and the caption, the caption and the edge of the cover, it’s easier on the separators (who did the job mechanically back then), but it unifies those things into a bloc...

…that separates the logo area (purple) from the main scene (blue). It divides and isolates.

In the second version, the sky blue doesn’t fade into light blue until much lower, which opens up the space, unifying the logo area and illustration area, and making the cover airier.

If you did that with the purple (and didn’t have a brown blurb), it’d work much better; it’s not the color but the contrasts and edges.

Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with K-tones (the gray bits) in principle, and the K-tones on Kid Colt’s shirt are fine; they provide modeling without muddying the image. The K-tones on the buildings are fine too (it’s the way that many of the townspeople are colored so they...

…blend into that gray that hurts. You don’t want them to pop, but you don’t want them to disappear, either.

But the K-tones on the gun-hilts and Hardin’s vest make them harder to see at a glance; they’re clear when you look but not if you’re skimming past that cover on a rack.

Both covers have their strengths, and both work — but there’s stuff to learn from them, too.

Incidentally, the reason the second one has no K-tones to it isn’t because Marvel decided they were bad, but because they stopped using them for some financial reason...

…they may have switched separators or something, and using K-tones cost more, so they eliminated them.

Also worth mentioning that the cover’s job was to attract the eye in a second or less, on a crowded magazine rack or comics spinner.

They wanted to catch the eye, get you to look at and read the cover, in hopes that you’d then pick up the comic and flip through it.

Second version’s logo is not only large, but it has bolder outlines, too.