The covers of comic books contain the price of the comic, title, a subtitle or other print to indicate that it features these characters. In a strip or logo near the top of the page sits the name of the company, the cover will predominantly feature artwork depicting
The penciller, inker and colourist on the cover often also work on the interior art but there are also cover artists who specialise either because they work in a hyperrealised, and no doubt exhaustive, style like Alex Ross or they do the work that instinctively tells a story both obliquely and concisely a la Tim Bradstreet.
The lettering might be confined to a sub-title on the cover. There was a style of action comic that once employed word balloons on its covers but the unworded image now dominates.
Anyone who doubts a place for the editor and publisher only has to consider how it is that there are rejected covers.
Although other covers share many of the same features as the comic book, there can be differences. A book will often have a cover illustration, perhaps even one with the protagonist engaged in some skirmish depicted in the story, but there are also books - for either economic or artistic reasons - that have plain covers. A magazine is more populist and utilitarian and relies on its lurid eyecatching front, though it can favour the aesthetically appealing over the content driven. While its close cousin the journal often goes the other way and has nothing but text on its cover. The cover of a video or DVD , which is to say the image and lettering that appears on the film poster (for the most part), probably resembles comic book covers more closely still, as it can be a scene from the movie, a generic action shot or profile of the main character(s). No word balloons, I'll grant you. And the record cover is that familiar combo of title and art. Newspapers are all about the headline, but also a photograph and front page news.
