Enrique Alcatena — Haunting Homage – Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Batman of Arkham #1 (Elseworlds one-shot), June, 2000

When you think of homages — or outright swipes — to classic comic book covers, a few classic and obvious issues come to mind:

Action #1
Fantastic Four #1
X-men #141

But there’s an issue slightly less obvious that may be the record holder with the most homages, especially with the same character:

Detective #31 (1939) by Bob Kane is just the third Batman cover ever, and a great one. It inspired Neal Adams to create his own version about thirty years later, and at that point, the floodgates opened. See below for as near a complete gallery as I could assemble. (Some are looser than others, but they all aim to capture the spirit of original cover.)

Meanwhile, on this gorgeous original cover by Alcatena (why isn’t he doing more comic book work?!) third time was a charm for me. I was under-bidder when it came up at auction. Shortly thereafter, when a major art dealer had it for sale, I missed it, and it sold again.

But that owner only had the cover a short while before he sold (or traded) it back to the same dealer, and this time I quickly managed to stake my claim on this beautifully detailed cover.