Art For Art’s Sake #258: Mignola’s ‘X-Men Classic’

Welcome once more to another trip through the history of comic book artwork. A veritable gallery of comic art to delight and amaze – it’s Art For Art’s Sake…

Later on, a gallery of Mike Mignola’s Classic X-Men covers… but first take a look at these…

Peach Momoko – Death and Delirium

Chris Samnee – Nick Fury

Paul Smith – Dr Strange and Black Knight

Tim Sale – Spider-Man

Bruce Timm – Catwoman

Darwyn Cooke – Harley & Ivy

David Lloyd – Wonder Woman

Mike Perkins – Swamp Thing

Jim Steranko – The Shadow

Joe Kubert’s Tarzan of the Apes Artist’s Edition Cover by Geof Darrow

And it’s only right to show you a little of Joe Kubert‘s Tarzan after that…

Barbarella by Jackson Guice

And the original… Jean Claude Forrest…

 

And to end with this week, we’ll have a look at the covers to X-Men Classic, which was always a clunky title that never slipped easily from the tongue. Far better when the reprint series began as Classic X-Men – but they wanted all the X-books to begin with X during those times!

Anyway, Classic X-Men ran for 110 issues from 1986 to 1995 with a fascinating way of splitting the book, half reprint of (no surprise) classic Claremont X-Men tales and half new material set at the time of the original tale. And these were gorgeous things, plenty of great artists involved including a lot of John Bolton, Kyle Baker, and Rick Leonardi. And then there were the cover artists – fabulous artwork from Art Adams, Steve Lightle, and Adam Hughes… and of course Mike Mignola.

And it’s Mignola’s art we’re going to be showing you here. A lot of it inked by P Craig Russell, another great artist and one who really suited Mignola’s pencils.