Hasta La Ideas

There are definitely some standout designers in the comics industry, ones who really know how to make comic book cover pop, but it’s still kind of sad that a well-designed comic cover is so infrequent in such a design-heavy field. And usually it’s the less-mainstream books that have more room to be creative with their cover designs, away from the stereotypical smorgasbords of superheroes. So imagine my surprise when I saw the cover for one of Marvel’s newest flagship titles, Wolverine and the X-Men, which looks like someone actually made some conscious design choices here!

That person is Eisner-nominated comic book letterer Jared K. Fletcher. Fletcher was tasked with corralling the plethora of Marvel’s X-Men titles under one central logo that could be tailored to fit the specific X-title, creating a family of X-Men logos. This is a sharp change from the past standard of each X-Men title having its own logo and branding, leading to confusion about which of the various X-titles fit into the overall X-Men universe.

Fletcher tracked down every old X-Men logo he could find, from comic books to video games. The general trend in the history of the comic’s logo was to separate the letter “X” from the “Men” and really emphasize the hyphen. Titles on the periphery, such as New Mutants or Wolverine, eliminated the “X-Men” entirely. Perhaps the most clever and iconic logo was Richard Starking’s New X-Men logo that reads the same upside down (i.e. it’s an ambigram).

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