José Luis García-López is an iconic artist with hundreds of comics under his belt. Road to Perdition, Legends of the Dark Knight, Superman, and many, many more. But García-López’s most lasting legacy may be the DC Comics Style Guide from 1982, where he set the house style for DC Comics characters. And now, DC is honoring that legacy with a series of variant covers in July.
The covers will all feature “character turnarounds,” with three different views of the heroes in various poses. The images will be rotated 90 degrees so they fit on a standard cover. As DC describes it via a press release provided to Comic Book Club, the “in-house document” was there to provide a “consistent look and characterization for DC’s Super Heroes.”
García-López’s designs weren’t just for comics, either. The goal was to create that consistency across everything DC was putting out: animated series, toys, trading cards, lunch boxes, and much more. Thanks to the DC Comics Style Guide, which was shared internally at DC as a 3-ring binder, anyone in the company could immediately get a sense of what Wonder Woman, The Flash and more were “supposed” to look like.
See The José Luis García-López Artist Spotlight Covers:
The Artist Spotlight variant covers will run in July on Batman #150, Green Arrow #14, Green Lantern #13, Shazam! #13, Superman #16, The Flash #11 and Wonder Woman #11. But you can check them out in the gallery below, and click the images for a larger version.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified these as wraparound covers.
