Ok, I’ll call it: as far as Batman-related covers go, nothing will ever beat Lucha Libre #774. And yet, many have tried, some have even come close. Last week I wrote about my soft spot for covers that have fun with Batman’s logo. As breathtaking as those are, you can find even more imaginative logo distortions if you look not just at comics where Batman is the star, but at other series associated with the Dark Knight.
For example, there are the comics about Batman’s superhero team, the JLA…
…and the ones about The Outsiders, Batman’s *other* superhero team:
There’s also the very cool Birds of Prey, about a team founded by ex-Batgirl Barbara Gordon:
And, of course, let us not forget the Suicide Squad, Washington’s criminal-based black ops team (and Dirty Dozen rip-off) where many of Batman’s rogues end up:
Because the various Robins need someone to hang out with while Batman is off hobnobbing with the big names, they’ve joined their own share of superhero teams with experimental covers, including Young Justice…
…and the Teen Titans:
The Teen Titans in particular have been around for quite a while (since the 1960s!) and have starred in several different series. Many of these comics playfully incorporate their logo into the cover images:
Sadly, in the last couple of decades this proud Teen Titan tradition has been mostly lost, so it’s a cause for celebration whenever it occasionally reappears in more recent incarnations:
Besides team comics, spin-offs about individual Batman characters have also found inventive strategies to frame the titles of their series, such as Nightwing…
…or Catwoman:
Curiously, for such a crappy comic, Azrael, Agent of the Bat had a surprisingly high number of covers that played with the logo in interesting ways:
Granted, although I’m a sucker for this kind of thing, even I have to admit artists are not always equally successful. Still, I’ll take an ambitious cover that screws up the logo because it tried to do something different over a boring one any day…
It actually took me a while to figure out what was going on in the cover above, but once I realized that the comic’s title was spelled out with knocked out ninjas, I was totally in. Now, if only that fourth guy had been decapitated…
NEXT: Obituaries for Gotham mayors.