This October, Marvel will release a set of variants that pay tribute to famous rap albums.  While I’m not personally big on rap, I appreciate the amount of work and dedication put into making these covers look just right.  The concept is unique and ties comics into mainstream culture in a way we haven’t typically seen.

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7 COMMENTS

  1. Except almost all the covers have been reconceptualized to be white characters. I have a real problem with that.

  2. Marvel could really “kill the game” by hiring non-white content creators instead of just mining non-white cultures for content.

  4. Capt. America is the only cover that works in the whole lot. And it is a great, meaningful cover.

    Dr. Strange/Dr. Dre we get it; lazy.
    Howard tha Duck is an ol’e dirty bastard, but this reeks of pointlessness.
    Amazing Spider-Man / ATCQ; the hook is the hands / feet. So pointless.
    Squirrel Girl, Ant Man, X-men are all WTF.
    Does a Fiddy cover play well to the current diversity audience’s need for safe spaces and who get bent out of shape (ba-da bum tish) over sexy Spiderwoman or Catwoman covers given recent Supreme Court rulings vs. his “f***** a** n*****” lyrics of his most notable song on the album? I guess Tony could appreciate needing to file bankruptcy for making a sex tape then releasing to Internet without permission; is there some life-imitating-art-imitatiLng… message there?
    Spider-Man/Deadpool fun, okay.

    Silly but True

  5. The history of American pop culture – music especially – has included example after example of genres and subcultures that develop within the African-American community, then get appropriated by white performers for a larger white audience. It isn’t that white people got into blues, jazz, R&B, disco, techno, but that they made it “theirs” in the process. That Elvis was the best-selling singer of “Negro music” in the country. Rap has a better track record than most in “staying black” on its own terms, but that exceptional status also makes it a more touchy example. And now here we have rap culture being filtered thru a bunch of white creators, by a publisher with a poor record of racial diversity in its hiring. It’s a very familiar pattern, and I can see why that makes it irritating to many African-Americans.

  6. I am more offended by the sheer laziness of these variants. The racial issue is a big deal ( Was there any body on the editorial board a person of color to look at these before they were released?), but man who was on the design team? Was this a last minute idea, because these covers look thrown together. If you would like, here is a designer who did a tribute to the Wu-Tang that shows how its done.

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/loganmills/sets/72157617640418633/

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