Excalibur Cover Gallery



For those familiar with the humour element that became a feature of Excalibur's covers, it may seem strange to learn there was a very hesitant genesis. Dark and gritty comics were in vogue and when Terry Kavanagh asked me to include humour on the covers I certainly wasn't confident it would work.The first issue was a traditional heroic pose with the Warwolves almost as an afterthought.In my sketch for the second issue the page was cropped down the right side of the Warwolf (excluding Meggan and about a third of the Warwolf) so that Rachel was the focus of the cover. Terry told me to pull back.For the third issue I went for a straight sight gag and Terry accepted it immediately.Issue 4 started out as a headache.After days of trying to come up with a cover sketch I decided the problem was that the issue, which was setting up a number of plots without any resolutions, didn't have a cover image in the story-- certainly not a humorous one. Writing that out in a note to Terry led me to the janitor image. Terry approved the sketch, and text, immediately (only changing the last line of text from '... You'll have to wait until next issue...' to '... You'll have to look inside...'. The first writing I did for Marvel.



I had intended Excalibur 17 to be my last issue but agreed to 'fill-in' on issues 23 and 24 to help with deadlines. Both Paul Neary and I had moved onto other work so it was all a bit chaotic which is why Paul inked over my breakdowns on issue 24 and I inked the cover,




The early issues of Excalibur (1-14, excepting 7&14 which had wraparound covers) featured a cover price of the new format.



Issue 43 was the second cover I 'wrote'. It was inspired by the fact the issue was in danger of missing the print deadline because of eleventh hour concerns over the 'romantic' relationship between Numbers and the Dragon. Numbers was an alien member of Gatecrasher's Technet who spoke and wore clothes-- the Dragon did neither. I was working on issue 46 when I heard someone had put two and two together and the story might have to be changed. Fortunately common sense prevailed and only one four word balloon was removed.



Something of a curiosity in the age of computer colouring. The multi coloured vortex effect on Excalibur 66 required five separate art pages for colour separation . One for Black-line art and one each for red, blue, yellow and white (the outline of Widget's ghostly body.) It seemed like a clever idea at the time.