One thing that strikes me, having now seen hundreds of covers in which people are shooting pistols/rayguns/blasters/blunderbusses of various kinds, is that none of these weapons seem to have any recoil or kickback whatsoever. You can hold them at incredibly awkward or dainty angles, and they will never hurt your wrist or fire wild. They might as well be bottles of spray perfume!
This suggests an essential difference between painters (educated in the traditional “art” field, however commercialised) and comics artists. The comics artists are visual storytellers and thus more interested in kinetics. A gun going off is an event, rather than a posed gesture. Sometimes the painted covers, silly as they are, remind me of Neo-Classical Victorian paintings of mythological scenes, in that they purport to be showing a scene of action but have an atmosphere of stasis, almost like statuary.
The cover of Planet Comics 62 is a reverse image of this.
Same company produced both titles.
One thing that strikes me, having now seen hundreds of covers in which people are shooting pistols/rayguns/blasters/blunderbusses of various kinds, is that none of these weapons seem to have any recoil or kickback whatsoever. You can hold them at incredibly awkward or dainty angles, and they will never hurt your wrist or fire wild. They might as well be bottles of spray perfume!
The art is usually done from static reference photos, so the guns look static
This suggests an essential difference between painters (educated in the traditional “art” field, however commercialised) and comics artists. The comics artists are visual storytellers and thus more interested in kinetics. A gun going off is an event, rather than a posed gesture. Sometimes the painted covers, silly as they are, remind me of Neo-Classical Victorian paintings of mythological scenes, in that they purport to be showing a scene of action but have an atmosphere of stasis, almost like statuary.