I finished adding header images for the current Series pages! There will be more of these eventually (like Millennium and Invasion, for starters) but I’ve gone ahead and added images for the ones currently active. I’ll go down the list alphabetically as they’re displayed in the side bar.
“Best-Of” Style Collection – For this one I took the image from the cover of DC’s Greatest Imaginary Stories, cropped it down and took out some distracting background elements, leaving this group of bros having cake. We’ve got Superman Red, Superman Blue and Batman II, apparently, plus… well, regular Captain Marvel? Honestly I’m not sure off the top of my head, but I felt the grouping said “collection of random stuff” well enough.
52 – I wanted to take art from one of 52’s many awesome covers, though I felt many of them were sort of spoilers. I mean, this cover, from the first issue, is a bit of one too, but it’s a little hard to avoid if you know anything about recent DC history (pretty widely publicized). This whole site is kinda one big giant spoiler, though I honestly try and stay away from ruining anything for anyone. I hate spoilers myself – I want to let people know what to read next with as little as possible explanation. In any case, I think this image says enough and is a good way to head the page for this series. I had to take out a few text elements and clean up the clouds for it to work.
Blackest Night – I haven’t actually read Blackest Night yet, myself, but I’ve seen this image around a few times on solicitations and news releases. It seems to set the tone rather nicely and worked fine for the header with just a quick crop.
Chronicles – What better way to introduce Chronicles than with the image on the cover of Superman Chronicles Vol. 1? I just love that pose. Looks like he’s surfing.
Crisis – This image from Infinite Crisis seemed suitably epic for the overall Crisis header. At this size it doesn’t spoil anything or seem too specific, but you can tell a whole lot of craziness is in store.
Crisis On Infinite Earths – Ok, so this one is definitely a spoiler, but it happened almost 30 years ago and has been played with a million times since then – so get over it! It was either this image of Superman holding Supergirl, or something to do with Wonder Woman. WW gets some play in a few of the other headers, so I figure I’d give Supergirl the nod. Cleaned up some text from the title of the issue to make it a little less awkward at this crop.
Crisis On Multiple Earths – I almost used this image of Barry Allen Flash and Jay Garrick Flash (from “Flash Of Two Worlds,” included in Crisis On Multiple Earths: The Team Ups Vol. 1) to illustrate the Silver Age list, but I decided to save it for use here. It marks the start of the multiple earth era and the beginning of a lot of really fun team ups. I left the text in this one, it loses something without it.
Crossover – I played with some DC/Top Cow images and a Batman/Spawn version, but in the end I had to go with this image from Batman vs. Aliens 2 (the second issue cover) because it just had such high graphic impact. Beautiful illustration. The graphic novel cover has the same image on black, but it didn’t look as good in the site layout. While I was at this I also fixed up the titles on some of these books and added the Aliens ones at least to the crossover series page.
Crossover Marvel / DC – Easy enough. It’s Spiderman Vs. Superman, collected in the first Crossover Classics volume. It was a landmark release and worked perfectly for the header image. I only had to clean up a little bit of detail in the background that just looked like dirt at this size.
Elseworlds – This was a hard choice! There’s so many good options. I almost went with vampire Batman (from Tales Of The Multiverse: Batman: Vampire) or even the warm hat Batman from Red Son, but in the end I decided most people would instantly understand the gist of Elseworlds after seeing Red Son Superman. I had to take out some text and then extend the sky to get this image to fit, but it worked a lot better than the cover image I was first working with. On a side note, the whole Elseworlds section is badly in need of a clean-up. The “etc” tag in those titles is just gonna go, that was for my personal organization and is no longer needed.
Final Crisis – I’ve always liked the “red sky” aspect of the Crisis events. This image was available without text on the DC website, so I didn’t have to edit it much. Made it an easy choice.
Greatest Stories Ever Told – Since so many of the books in this series feature a cover illustration by Alex Ross, it was only fitting that I would use his work for the header image as well. This is the cover image for Superman / Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told Vol. 1.
Infinite Crisis – I went through a few different choices before settling on this image from the cover of the Infinite Crisis hardcover trade release. I originally had the picture from the softcover Infinite Crisis, but I felt that at the size of the header image, it just really showed the big three without telling much about the event. This image looks a little more epic and hints at a variety of story elements.
Showcase Presents – This was the first header image up on the site and was just a quick grab, but it’s grown on me. Robin is talking jive to Batman in a pretty standard late Silver Age / early Bronze Age fashion. I can’t help it, it’s just deliciously stupid. I did do a little contrast and color correction on this one, though, to make it pop a bit more and keep it black and white, since all the reprints in this series are without color.
Zero Hour – Last but not least is Zero Hour. This is the cover from issue #1 (actually the second in the series, since it started with zero, understandably) and I always liked the almost pure white cover with the tiny heroes on it.
That’s it for now!
I don’t think that I’ll be going through and adding headers to the character or creator pages yet, at least not on a one by one basis at this point. I want to turn my attention towards adding the rest of the database content so I can get the site up to full functionality. I figured the Series and List pages would get the most use while I was doing this, so they were a priority, but now I gotta focus on the books, the books, the books, the books!
Thanks for your patience and support, guys. Those of you who have emailed me or chatted with me about this on the forums are totally keeping me going!
