ungoliantschilde reblogged
Joshua Middleton.
Mark Bagley.
Mark does not get enough credit. He really does not. As fans, it is easy to brush over what Mark does and say that we like a trendier artist more than him. Mark Bagley is consistent, fast, and he can tell a damn good story. The guy is great at every aspect of comics, frankly. I have never seen a story he illustrated that was not perfectly plotted, paced, and rendered in just the right way to fight the writing. He is versatile, switching from cover work to storytelling effortlessly. He handles cheesecake/beefcake as well as any of his peers, and the list goes on and on. But, more than anything, Bagley is dependable. Bendis and Bagley did Ultimate Spider-Man for 110 issues or (some similarly ridiculously high number of consecutive issues) and I do not think they even missed a solicitation date. That means that Mark penciled the covers and 22+ pages of interiors for more than a hundred issues without ever missing a beat or a deadline. Back in the '90s, Todd McFarlane on Spider-Man was all the rage. McFarlane set the tone in the early 90s, but when I think of Spidey in the '90s, I think of Bagley. From 2001 onward, most Spider-Fans I know would agree that Ultimate Spidey was the best and most consistently good Spider-Book around. And Mark did all of it. He made it look easy too. Bagley is frigging great at what he does, and he should be treated as such.
Ed Benes ~ Art Process for the Justice League of America #01, written by Brad Meltzer, from way back in 2006.
The first two published covers (side by side) were the 50/50 covers of the first print. Neither is more valuable!
The cover with the Letterbox Format is the 2nd Print.
The last cover, where the image is sideways and it says NOT FOR SALE where the UPC would go, is a Diamond Distributor’s Retailer Summit Exclusive from the Baltimore ComicCon in 2006. It is the most valuable of the many, many variant covers for this series.