Gone but not forgotten : Marvel Corner Image boxes

One of the many fascinating things about comics in the 1960’s/1970s were those great little corner box images that appeared on the covers of all Marvel comic books at this time. While they have now all but faded out of existence they were at one point in time a prominent feature of any Marvel comic book - and I loved them. As time went on and the characters costumes and/or art styles changed so to did those amazing little images on the left hand corner of the comic cover so there would be various versions of Thor, Spiderman, the Avengers etc. The corner box tradition carried on for decades until the early 1990s when for the most part, they were simply and unceremoniously dropped.

f course the corner box image wasn’t just reserved for Marvels Superhero comics as they also used them for their mystery, western and humour comics. Some of their mystery /horror images were pretty cool as can be seen above.

However, it really was the Marvel superhero corner image box that attracted my attention and made me want to pick up titles that I hadn't read before just to obtain that wee image. It really was a great marketing/branding idea and one I feel played a small, but important part of Marvels success.

Although Marvel were the main proponents of the corner box image other companies also used these including Warren publishing and even Charlton.

In the late 1990’s / early 2000’s artist Joe Jusko created a series of painted cover box images based on the originals that are pretty cool and would look amazing on the cover of any modern Marvel comic book.