One of the things I love about Golden Age comic books are their covers; the big, bold logos, the wildly frantic action scenes which tended to have little if anything to do with their contents featuring iconic images of heroic figures in action sprawled across them. At first they were just illegitimate imitations of pulp magazine covers but quickly became something wonderfully garish and grotesque that was all their own. But whether the product of a keen sense of design honed from decades of working in the publishing industry or just unbridled adolescent exuberance at work they got the job done. They provided their readers with the promise of the impossible made possible and in the process sold comic books by the millions.

But I also love them when they’re none of those things. And since I’m still recovering from the Holidays, here’s a bunch of covers that I like for no other reason than I like them. About the only thing they all have in common is they all look remarkably generic — as if a major Hollywood movie studio was making a movie and for plot or legal purposes they couldn’t use an actual comic so had their art department created a couple of mock ups.

I mean, Atom Bomb? Really? I would have bet $20 that there had never been a comic book named Atomic Bomb…

From the fairly snazzy mystery man on the cover you’d expect X-Venture to be a pretty standard Golden Age anthology comic book but sadly he’s just the villain in a trite crime story. And sadly neither “Atomic Wizard” or “Holy Dervish” were superheroes.

And, finally, nothing quite captures the “gosh, fighting a war sure is fun!” attitude of the popular culture of the times quite like this curiosity; American Air Forces wasn’t a comic book but rather a collection of text pieces and black and white photographs on the war that had, for no apparent reason, a comic book cover.