man at laptop revealing superhero outfit A world of covers: This online catalog just might bring out your inner undershirt. iStockphoto.com
 

by Glen Weldon

www.coverbrowser.com.

It's all there in the url, really. You click, you browse. Forever.

Browse what?

Covers. Hundreds upon thousands of comic book covers, is what. ForEVer.

Oh. Yeah, okay.

Whee!

No, yeah, fine, I guess. But wait, no: What is there to love about a website that simply archives old comic book covers?

Um...I mean...everything? I don't ... I don't understand the question.

Surely it's just a means of cataloging, no? And thus sort of like getting excited about a particularly adroit application of the Dewey Decimal System?

.... What's your point?

And anyway it's not like there aren't several sites that archive comic book covers, if that's really what warms your particular cockles. And those sites, unlike this one, provide useful, concrete information about the issues in question -- year, featured characters, plot synopses.

Pfft. That stuff just gets in the way of the pure, crystalline adrenaline rush of four-color goodness. The allusive, right-brain, stream-of-consciousness, goose-pimply....

Seems sorta ... squishy, is all. Lacking in rigor. I mean check out that nondescript homepage. Where do you even start? How do you know when you're done?

Ah, you just need someone to get you started.

After the jump: We get you started.

Just pick a title, any title, and see where it takes you.

Click open Tales to Astonish, and watch how quickly the title morphed from being the go-to hangout of giant, phonemically named monsters (Groot! Krang! and Droom! The Living Lizard!) to the monthly home of your garden-variety, underpants-outside-the-tights teeny little superguy.

Relive the swingin' 70's with the Legion of Super-Heroes, that magical time when they fought off interstellar threats in outfits that even Cher at her Bob Mackie-est would spurn: gravity-defying necklines, hip-hugging short-shorts, and collars. Big collars.

Peruse Girls' Love Stories ("It -- It was only a game he was playing! H-he doesn't love me -- he never did!"), and let your heart thrill, your face flush, your eyes glisten with every (choke!) and (sob!).

Click through Creepy, and find your own answers to that eternal question, "What socket-shocking surprises await you inside this haunting holocaust of holiday horror!" (Let's go ahead and throw in a sic, where that question mark should be. And also: "holocaust"? You sure that's the word you want there, bunky?)

Hark back to the very first time Peter Parker whined about something!

And maybe ... just maybe ... stumble across a comic you owned as a kid, and let the mere sight of it spark a rush of vivid, primary-colored childhood memories. Thus proving, once and for all, that the right issue of Marvel Team-Up can make Proust's madeleine seem like a moldy saltine the mice have been at.

categories: Comics

8:27 - February 17, 2009

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