Michael Turner covers Identity Crisis
June 29th, 2008 -- by Scott Cederlund --> · No Comments
While I may have my own issues with the story in Identity Crisis, none of those were involved around the artwork. Rags Morales on the interiors was a great pick to do this story and Mike Turner’s covers did what covers should– they enticed the potential reader without giving too much of the story away.
This cover to Identity Crisis #4 may be one of my favorite pieces by Turner. Up to this point of the story, we really hadn’t gotten Wonder Woman’s reactions to the events of the book and the truths uncovered. This cover showed a woman searching for the truth (or THE TRUTH!) I hoped that she would have been the sane one in the book from this cover, maybe even playing the cool and detatched detective that’s usually Batman’s role but that’s not what Meltzer had planned. I like how the character emerges from the shadows, lighted only by the lasso.
The cover to issue #2 is one of the only group shots of Turners that’s really good from this series. The covers to #1 and #3 show the weakness that crept often into his drawings but this image, lighted like #4, is a nice image representing the satellite era JLA.
I don’t think I’ve ever noticed before how the covers for #5 and #6 are so strongly related to each other, as the dynamic duo face the loss and inability to solve and stop the murders. #5 is a nice, simple image and I like how the edges fade to white as Turner knows when to pull back from the image. He puts just enough information in this image to let you know what’s going on.
Like #4, I think this is an image with a lot of undelivered promise. The hint that there’s nothing actually substantial beneath the costumes is something I think Identity Crisis was striving for but, other than in this picture, it never really achieved. There’s a great amount of restraint in this image, something I don’t think is often associated with Turner, as he again leaves a white background. Emptiness? Innocence? Abandonment? There’s many things this cover could be telling the reader as the issue lays out what’s actually been happening in this series.
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Tags: comics
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