Lois Lane #87
I love looking at comic book covers — I can easily head down the rabbit hole on-line or at a convention scanning through them. To my mind, no one shook up the comic book cover world more than Neal Adams.
I was a kid when Neal’s realistically dynamic DC covers transformed the line, modernizing and freshening many titles pretty much overnight. 1968 rolled in, and suddenly Lois Lane wore contemporary clothing and had fashionable haircuts, Superboy’s foes looked genuinely menacing, and… Batman and Green Arrow?” The rest as they say, is history.
This is the unpublished cover for Lois Lane 87. Neal told me that any unpublished DC covers are “self-rejected,” meaning that he decided he didn’t like them himself, as opposed to any editorial dictate. Either way, you can see the switch makes sense. The “rejected” cover has Superman breaking up a scuffle. The published cover, where the characters are flying, rather than on the ground, makes it much clearer that two super-powered women are trying to kill each other. (Although Superman never had to actually break up the fight in the story itself. Lois handled it herself, thank you very much.)
That said, I like the overall appearance of the unpublished cover much better and the “Fortress of Solitude” interior, with chair and control center, is especially cool.
