FAQ's
Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Are these real?

A: Yep, they're all authentic and unaltered. They appear to you today exactly as they did the day they were first published.

Except that whole appearing on a computer screen part..

Q: So do you hate DC comics or something?

A: Nah. How could I hate something that has given me so many hours of entertainment? Seriously though, while I'm not the biggest fan of most of their titles, I'm a die-hard Batman fan and love just about everything that's ever been published under the Vertigo imprint.

Q: How'd this all start?

A: Back in November of 2004, a guy named Mike Miksch started a thread at a Transformers message board called The Allspark about insane comic book covers throughout the ages. Initially it was a laugh in at the expense of Lois Lane Comics, but before the responses had gotten past even the first page, Mike had posted a pair of pictures depicting Superman burning a father's day gift from Jimmy and laughing in Lois's face as she begged him to prevent her from being forced to marry Titanman, and inadvertently set the tone for the resulting 30+ pages of responses:

Superman is a dick.

Technically he said "Superman is such a dick," but the "such" was subsequently dropped from the mantra. And from there it spread across a fair number of blogs and other discussion board forums, which Mike didn't become aware of until his coworker came up to him and told him that he'd seen the thread and was surprised to see that Mike started it. From there it was imitated by I-Mockery when they did a write up about about stupid comic book covers focusing on Jimmy Olsen comics. That made the front page of Fark.com, where someone posted a link to the original thread on The Allspark, so it all came full circle.

At more than a quarter million views, that thread beats out the nearest competitor ten times over. Such is the appeal of Superman is a Dick.

Q: So why start a website?

A: No one realistically expected the thread to become such a phenomenon. Sure, it wasn't anywhere near the fad that "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" was, but even the amount of popularity that it had was a big surprise.

And that popularity lead to a bit of a problem. Those pictures were being hot linked off Comics.org. A couple dozen people downloading dozens of pictures from their servers was bad enough, but a quarter of a million downloads fell clearly on the side of bandwidth theft. But no one wanted to have to shut the party down, so the solution that was conceived was to relocate the whole thing with locally hosted images.

Q: What's with the repeated stories?

A: As you go through the gallery of comic covers, you'll no doubt notice a few instances where two different covers featuring the exact same story are juxtaposed together. Now I've not been able to confirm this, but I'm told that these are in fact not reprints, just that the same premise got recycled a few months later.

Why would they do this? Apparently the rationale was that in any given year the comic title will have a near completely new audience compared to the one it had last year, so they felt free to reuse story ideas because it was all new to their current readership. And we're not talking about a simple rehash of a broad idea like "Lois gets married" or "Lois gets superpowers," we're talking about specific plots like "Jimmy gets his brain switched with a gorilla's," or "Jimmy gets turned into a werewolf."

Q: Will you provide summaries for these issues?

A: Thought about it, probably not for several reasons.

1.) I don't have access to any of these issues, so I can't go and look them up myself and see what's what.

2.) I do know what a few of the bizarre covers are about, but only a few. It seems like kind of a waste to set up a section of explanations of what's going on in these issues only to have three entries. Unless I can do it for all of them, I'd rather do it for none.

3.) The purpose of this site is to make you laugh, and half the humor of these covers is that they're completely devoid of context. Trust me, finding out what's going on in the pages within makes some of them actually make sense, and then they're just not that funny anymore.

I'm doing you a favor. Really. If you're dying to know what happens, there are summaries floating around the internet for some of them. That's what Google is for.

Q: These are hilarious!

A: Thank you. But that's a statement, not a question.

Q: You should print these up on T-shirts. Will you?

A: While I do agree that printing these covers up on T-Shirts and selling them at inflated prices at places like Hot Topic would be a cash cow waiting to happen, it's not my call. Doing so would bring down the wrath of AOL Time Warner's legal department, which would smush me like a gnat. Plus there's some Marvel and Archie (Among other companies) stuff in there too, and I don't think they'd like it either.

All is not lost though, as I'm looking into some sort of merchandising that would be kosher with copyright laws. Stay tuned.

Q: Where can I find more funny covers?

A: Comics.org is the single greatest resource on the internet for digging up comic book covers. The only catch is that usually you have to know what you're looking for. I can only offer the sketchiest of guidelines to aid you in your search;

1.) The older the covers, the more unintentionally hilarious they tend to be.

2.) Novelty titles like Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen provided most of the content you see here, so start with those.

3.) DC Comics tends to be the most ridiculous.

This website is by no means a comprehensive list of hilarious comic book covers. You're sure to find some drop dead funny ones that we missed.

Q: I found a hilarious cover!

A: Good for you, Skippy! Is there a question in there somewhere?

Q: Can I submit a cover to you?

A: By all means. This isn't a comprehensive list of funny covers, but that doesn't mean it can't try to be! There are, however, a couple criteria:

1.) Can't be one we already have. Duh.

2.) Has to be funny. I know this seems obvious, but plenty of people have offered up covers with cries of "ROFFLEHAUS L@@K AT THIS 1!!!!11eleven!" only to post a cover that... just wasn't funny. The cardinal rule is; Unintentionally funny > Intentional attempts to be funny. There are some of the latter variety in here, but for the most part when a comic cover tries to be humorous, it falls flat. However, that doesn't make all serious attempts automatically funny either...

3.) If the joke needs an explanation, please provide one. Sometimes the funniest ones are the most subtle (i.e. it took me a shamefully long time to get what was funny about the "Giant Sized Man-Thing" issue because I was looking at for a joke in the picture instead of reading the title).

Once you've got those bases covered, fire off an e-mail with THE URL OF THE IMAGE ONLY. Do not do not DO NOT attach it to the e-mail, otherwise it will never even reach me.

Q: If Superman's a dick, what's Bizarro?

A: A pussy.