Variant covers are big business for comic companies, but they also allow publishers to spotlight certain artists. To that end, DC Comics is honoring legendary artist José Luis García-López with a series of variant covers. The covers will run throughout July 2024, across DC’s most popular titles.
DC announced their effort to honor José Luis García-López on the company blog. While he’s been drawing comics for DC since 1975, he is most famous for his work on the publisher’s style guides. To that end, the upcoming covers are based on the character turnarounds he created for the 1982 DC Comics Style Guide.
All seven of the José Luis García-López covers can be viewed below.
José Luis García-López Style Guides Explained
The DC Comics Style Guide is an in-house document used for marketing purposes. The intent of the guide was to enforce a consistent look to how DC’s characters appeared outside of comics. The guide was primarily used by animators and toy designers to see how different heroes and villains should look. The guide also instructed artists working on packaging featuring the superheroes and supervillains. Over the past four decades, the guides have been used to design lunch boxes, trading cards, sticker books and countless other bits of merchandise.
José Luis García-López illustrated the original 1982 guide, but has drafted similar documents for DC Comics. He created three separate guides for Superman in 1991, 1994, and 2006. He also created general DC Universe guides in 1998, 2004, and 2012. His influence on the artists who came after him is incalculable given how many artists were trained with his designs. Given that, it is only right that DC Comics should honor him with a spotlight month highlighting his work.
