Over the years, the titles published by DC Comics have provided some truly iconic covers, with distinct visual tropes that have been homaged and parodied over and over again. Among them is Kevin Maguire’s 1987 cover for Justice League International #1, which was marked by the now-ubiquitous image of its team members standing on a white background, looking up at the reader with an array of facial expressions. The iconography of the cover has been taken into countless other comics, television, and pop culture as a whole, with Maguire himself even contributing to the pastiches. Over the weekend, Maguire took to Twitter to share a reimagined look at the cover for its recent 35th anniversary — particularly, a version imagining what the team would look like in the present day.
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Maguire’s cover takes the genesis of the cover to new heights, with Guy Gardner, Batman, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Maxwell Lord, Fire, Ice, G’nort, Black Canary, Doctor Light, Martian Manhunter, and Rocket Red all shown as their older counterparts. This is far from the first time that Maguire has reimagined the cover of Justice League International #1, previously drawing a masked and socially-distanced version of the team at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.
Launched in 1987 following the Legends crossover event, Justice League International was poised to be a new turn for the iconic superhero team, especially as the A-list mainstays like Superman, Wonder Woman, and The Flash were unavailable to be used on the book.
“Creatively, it was the best thing that ever happened to us, that we didn’t get Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, all those guys together,” JM DeMatteis, who co-created the book alongside Maguire and co-writer Keith Giffen, told Entertainment Weekly in 2017. “Because we ended up with a bunch of, for the most part, B-level characters. No one cared! That gave us the freedom to take those characters and make them our own. We could’ve never done that Justice League, with all that humor and all those odd character beats, had we been working with the big guns. Because we’d have had every editor of those characters down our throats. ‘You guys are writing Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Fire and Ice, Oberon? Go ahead! Do whatever you want!’”
What do you think of Maguire’s new take on Justice League International #1? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
