10 Terrible Comic Book Covers Marvel Wants You To Forget

There are cases when a gimmick cover works well, but there are plenty more where it fails completely. The Amazing Spider-Man #400 is an example of the latter thanks to a poorly executed embossed cover depicting a tombstone.

The purpose of the tombstone is clear: someone is dead in this issue and it's an important death in regards to Spider-Man. The only problem - you can't see the image or the title on the cover.

It's fairly important to be able to read the cover of a book without having to pick it up and flip through the pages. Because the emboss covered the drawing (right side of the picture), it wasn't immediately clear what was sitting on the shelf.

There aren't many collectors who slab ASM #400 so they can display it proudly. The cover looks terrible, which is a shame seeing as it obscures some beautiful artwork by Mark Bagley. Fortunately, this was a variant cover, but it remains as a poor example of cover embossing.