Every year's end seems to come along with grave predictions about the future of the comic book industry, with glass-half-empty-types claiming that falling sales and some poor creative decisions are driving away audiences and failing to make it a financially viable medium. Despite all that naysaying, however, a good couple of hundred issues are published every week, from the small press lot to the Big Two of Marvel and DC, with new series debuting all the time as well. When the racks of your local comic shop are so bursting with titles, how do you make one stand out from the rest? With the covers, obviously. That whole "don't judge a book by its cover" thing, ironically, is a metaphor that doesn't actually work literally. Like, you can judge a book by its cover in most cases. Publishers spend a lot of money designing book covers that are meant to make them appeal to their target audience. And that's the same approach taken to comic books, with artists who don't work on interiors all that much managing to make a living solely from cover art. This year has been a particularly good one for classic comic book covers, with the small presses and Big Two alike making some more daring choices with the designs, characters, and artists they call upon. It's been a pretty great year for the stuff that's actually hidden within them, too, but right now it's time to judge those books otherwise: here are the twenty best comic book covers of 2015.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
