One of the trademarks of the Bronze Age was Marvel and DC’s increasing use of reprints. They were cheaper than new material, easier than new material and attracted lots of fans like me who were either too young to have read them or couldn’t afford them. Reprint books still faced the same challenge every comic book faced: getting potential buyers to snatch them off the spinner racks. Like every other comic book, that requires a cool cover.
Case in point, the cover for the Wanted DC Special shown here. As I said at the link above, taking superhero stories and presenting them as stories about their foes clicked with me and lots of other fans; Wanted got two DC Specials, then a reprint series. And the individual images are all attention grabbing: well-known villains, heroes defeated, what’s not to love?
A lot of the reprints were not specials. At DC we had Strange Adventures and From Beyond the Unknown; Marvel had monster books such as Creatures on the Loose and various books reprinting their Silver Age superhero yarns. Again, the covers were gripping, like this John Romita image from the Spidey reprint book Marvel Tales #31 (cover dated July 1971)
It’s simply reprinting the cover of Amazing Spider-Man #42 but you know what? It still works five years later. The Tales issue has a couple more stories in it but I think they picked the right one for the cover spot.
DC’s reprint books tried to show more of the contents on the cover. Murphy Anderson’s cover for Strange Adventures #231 does it with the column on the left while focusing on the eye-catching cover (from a story I’ve blogged about before). Others, like the Wanted special, went for multiple images. DC seems to have preferred that for reprint specials and giants, as in these cover-dated from July 1971. Dick Giordano’s Aquaman cover — 
— and this Batman giant, also by Giordano.
I don’t think either one is as striking as the Wanted cover but they’re striking enough. As Greg Hatcher reminisced in one column, the Aquaman giant promises some cool stories. The Batman shows us Bruce Wayne targeted for death, unmasked by an old woman, framed for murder — that’s enough for any Bat-fan.
Murphy Anderson’s cover for a Strange Sports Stories collection also offers cool fun.
But then there’s Super DC-Giant #25, featuring the recently cancelled Challengers of the Unknown.
With Kirby’s Fourth World books in full spring, I presume reprinting a set of Challs-creator Jack Kirby’s early work on the series was meant to attract his fans, as indicated by the above-the-title name dropping. However the look of the Jack Kirby cover is terrible. The central images are the Challengers standing still, staring into the camera, and them staring into the camera from behind cell bars. Not very interesting if you’re not already a fan, and maybe not if you are. The image at the top isn’t eye-catching either. The only real hook is a giant lizard fighting the Challengers at the bottom of the cover. I can’t imagine it hooked many people.
I assume editor Murray Boltinoff cut panels out of the stories and figured that would make a good enough cover. They should have gone ahead and paid Kirby to design something new.
