Last week we talked about Marvel’s ‘theme’ variant covers, and I expressed a personal gripe of including logos on those covers. To briefly recap: the logos obscure the art (which is specifically the thing you’re buying a variant cover for), and often the covers appear on books they’re completely unrelated to, so including a Spider-Man logo on a cover featuring Star-Lord just seems weird all around. This wasn’t the first time we’ve talked about this, either; there’s an entire By Its Cover column devoted to covers with no text on them.

Well Marvel appears to have heard our plaintive pleas, as today they announced that the January-shipping 80th Anniversary theme variant covers by artist Phil Noto will be logo-less. Each cover in the series represents a different decade in Marvel’s history. Have a look at four of the nine covers:


Amazing Spider-Man #13


Avengers #12


Champions #1


Immortal Hulk #11

Just look at those beautiful covers. Can you imagine sullying any of those with unrelated logos or text? What a crime that would be. And there are still five more covers that haven’t been shown yet, for the following books:

  • Captain America #7
  • Fantastic Four #6
  • Thor #9
  • Tony Stark: Iron Man #8
  • Venom #10

Hopefully the logo-less variant cover will become a trend that Marvel sticks to. Look for these books in shops next month.

5 COMMENTS

  1. rejoice Retailers! selling comics from a rack with no way for customers to tell what they are!

    marvel are great retail partners!

  2. “including a Spider-Man logo on a cover featuring Star-Lord just seems weird all around.”

    As opposed to having a cover with half a dozen characters who don’t appear inside the book, and none of the characters who do???

  3. This would be more interesting if Marvel was actually going to revive the Blonde Phantom, the Golden Age Angel, the teenage Patsy Walker, the Western heroes, etc., in new series of their own. But, of course, it’s almost certainly NOT going to happen. Although I’ll be happy if i’m proven wrong.

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