A while back I posted about how important cover art is to a book -whether comic book or prose. I learnt as a youngster that a good piece of art will always attract the customer's eye -after all we do not look at a row of books on a shelf and think "How well written and paced"!
A few years back at one of the old Bristol comic expo events I was checking out the tables and saw a rather glum looking fellow. Self publisher so I thought I'd have a chat. It seems that he had "positive comments" from people but sold very few copies. I looked at the tables either side of his and could see the problem. I asked whether he was open to advice about his book. He told me that he was.
I was told that his comic was printed using Print On Demand which means that you tend to get a full colour cover. He had opted -for some strange reason- not to have the colour cover but go with black and white instead. I suggested that, if he could, he really ought to try a colour cover and explained all the benefits of this and how attracting the punter (potential buyer) attention was important. His response was classic:
"No, I think the black and white cover is okay and works well"
That was it.
A few months later I heard from this man who told me "You seem to have been right". Well, I am me so of course I was :-) :-) It seems that after disappointing sales he had decided to go with a full colour cover and people started buying copies.
If you are at a comic event -I think there will be very few of those this year- and sat either side of your table are people selling b&w comics with full colour covers and you are sat there with a black and white cover 99.5% of people are going to walk past. Me, I head straight for the b&w cover to see what's in it.
There are certain exceptions. If you look at the Ben Dilworth written/drawn Tick Tock It's The Clock you will notice that the only colour on the cover is the book title. Ben had no cover so I drew it and it took about an hour of editing til I got it right. I'm told that it is "very eye-catching" but I used some image-play here. I had a vague recollection of a German (?) book catalogue that came out following the Dick Tracy movie in 1990 (yeah, I am that old) and there was a piece of full colour art of Tracy firing his gun. Now, I decided to make the cover art negative (b&w) and hoped that nostalgia might make people think of the movie and buy out of curiosity -which depended on whether they saw the movie, liked it and still remembered it!
The colour used in the title text is rather subdued and only used to show the character's name. It works and I can tell you that I tried about 15 font types before picking this one. I also made the mistake of making the background red -matching up with the bullet-hole riddled cover and action of the figure. B-I-G mistake. Nice red but the black was lost in it all.
So you can use black and white imagery on a cover so long as there is something there to catch the eye -even if "just" the logo.
You do need to be careful not to over-think things as I have seen covers so crammed with detailsand colour that all they did was confuse. I tried a colourful psychedelic cover for The Independents and comments on it ranged from "Is it designed to give someone an epileptic seizure" and so on. Looked great -people could see it from across the room- but even the hint that potential customers might be put off by a cover meant that I dumped that one!
Around 1986/1987 Ben Dilworth and I took a bundle of acetate covers and some templates and colour car sprays to a grassy area. Using these we created the colour acetate covers for Black Tower Previews Comic. We had a couple of walkers ask what we were doing out of pure interest (I should have carried comics with me to sell!). The covers looked good and editors at Fleetway, IPC and Marvel UK still had their copies into the mid 1990s. The cover idea was all Dilworth's as he did a great deal of experimenting with mediums on covers while most other small pressers were happy to get a black & white illo for a cover!
Back then we were all flying on the seats of our pants in creating things -Myran Hancock and her lino-stamped, well designed zines and a couple other people tried ideas but Dilworth put his design to work on a number of titkles from other publishers such as Bum Comics.
Most people do not want to think about designs or even formats such as mini comics (A6), piccolo or landscape -so long as they get their books published that's it. Nothing wrong with that but I like seeing what people can come up with.
Always remember that before the person buys he/she will need to have their attention attracted and your cover is what will do that.
A few years back at one of the old Bristol comic expo events I was checking out the tables and saw a rather glum looking fellow. Self publisher so I thought I'd have a chat. It seems that he had "positive comments" from people but sold very few copies. I looked at the tables either side of his and could see the problem. I asked whether he was open to advice about his book. He told me that he was.
I was told that his comic was printed using Print On Demand which means that you tend to get a full colour cover. He had opted -for some strange reason- not to have the colour cover but go with black and white instead. I suggested that, if he could, he really ought to try a colour cover and explained all the benefits of this and how attracting the punter (potential buyer) attention was important. His response was classic:
"No, I think the black and white cover is okay and works well"
That was it.
A few months later I heard from this man who told me "You seem to have been right". Well, I am me so of course I was :-) :-) It seems that after disappointing sales he had decided to go with a full colour cover and people started buying copies.
If you are at a comic event -I think there will be very few of those this year- and sat either side of your table are people selling b&w comics with full colour covers and you are sat there with a black and white cover 99.5% of people are going to walk past. Me, I head straight for the b&w cover to see what's in it.
There are certain exceptions. If you look at the Ben Dilworth written/drawn Tick Tock It's The Clock you will notice that the only colour on the cover is the book title. Ben had no cover so I drew it and it took about an hour of editing til I got it right. I'm told that it is "very eye-catching" but I used some image-play here. I had a vague recollection of a German (?) book catalogue that came out following the Dick Tracy movie in 1990 (yeah, I am that old) and there was a piece of full colour art of Tracy firing his gun. Now, I decided to make the cover art negative (b&w) and hoped that nostalgia might make people think of the movie and buy out of curiosity -which depended on whether they saw the movie, liked it and still remembered it!
The colour used in the title text is rather subdued and only used to show the character's name. It works and I can tell you that I tried about 15 font types before picking this one. I also made the mistake of making the background red -matching up with the bullet-hole riddled cover and action of the figure. B-I-G mistake. Nice red but the black was lost in it all.
So you can use black and white imagery on a cover so long as there is something there to catch the eye -even if "just" the logo.
You do need to be careful not to over-think things as I have seen covers so crammed with detailsand colour that all they did was confuse. I tried a colourful psychedelic cover for The Independents and comments on it ranged from "Is it designed to give someone an epileptic seizure" and so on. Looked great -people could see it from across the room- but even the hint that potential customers might be put off by a cover meant that I dumped that one!
Around 1986/1987 Ben Dilworth and I took a bundle of acetate covers and some templates and colour car sprays to a grassy area. Using these we created the colour acetate covers for Black Tower Previews Comic. We had a couple of walkers ask what we were doing out of pure interest (I should have carried comics with me to sell!). The covers looked good and editors at Fleetway, IPC and Marvel UK still had their copies into the mid 1990s. The cover idea was all Dilworth's as he did a great deal of experimenting with mediums on covers while most other small pressers were happy to get a black & white illo for a cover!
Back then we were all flying on the seats of our pants in creating things -Myran Hancock and her lino-stamped, well designed zines and a couple other people tried ideas but Dilworth put his design to work on a number of titkles from other publishers such as Bum Comics.
Most people do not want to think about designs or even formats such as mini comics (A6), piccolo or landscape -so long as they get their books published that's it. Nothing wrong with that but I like seeing what people can come up with.
Always remember that before the person buys he/she will need to have their attention attracted and your cover is what will do that.
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