Back when I listed 10 great Catwoman covers, I regrettably didn’t include this homage to the poster for the awesome crime movie Bullitt:
That image was part of a cool stunt DC pulled a few months ago, in which it commissioned a bunch of variant covers featuring movie poster homages. The results were all quite neat, with most artists going for predictably geeky and/or action-y references…
…while others seemingly thought more outside the box and came up with some outlandish choices:
As a total movie buff, I was all over this. In fact, it was such a fun shtick that I’m surprised the idea hasn’t been done more often in the Bat-books… after all, comic cover artists love intertextual homages.
That said, of course this is not *completely* unprecedented. Bat-covers had previously toyed with the whole movie poster design thing:
And although more loosely than in the covers for Harley Quinn and Batgirl, others had already riffed on Jailhouse Rock and Purple Rain:
Indeed, now that I think about it I realize that there have been more film references on the covers of Bat-books than in Community’s paintball episodes!
There have been nods to Jurassic Park, to Sergio Leone’s ‘Dollars Trilogy,’ to Star Wars and, more recently, to Night of the Hunter:
During his string of fun covers for Harley Quinn in the early 2000s, Terry Dodson worked in a number of memorable parodies, including of famous movie posters:
Moreover, if you go as far back as the Silver Age, it’s not difficult to find covers (and stories) that blatantly took their cues from motion pictures:
And then of course there’s James Bond, with that iconic imagery of female silhouettes and closing lenses, not to mention the dashing gentleman with the gun…
On the cover of Batman comics, the 007 style has been both spoofed and played more-or-less straight:
More recently, with the reinvention of Dick Grayson as a super-spy, artists couldn’t resist returning to this well:
In addition, The Godfather movies have been another obvious source, especially for gangster stories:
Finally, I’m pretty sure artist Jerry Bingham was giving a wink to Forbidden Planet in this cover for The New Teen Titans:
Although, to be fair on this last one, Bingham could also be referencing just any of countless 1950s’ posters for B-movies with sci-fi creatures holding unconscious humans…
No wonder aliens think Earth girls are easy!
NEXT: Batman shoots dolphins.