Looking At A Couple Of Covers

I know "Separated at Birth" is Bully's thing, but hopefully he won't mind if I borrow it as a starting point for this post. 

 As I mentioned Wednesday, Spectacular Spider-Man #206 (penciled and inked by Sal Buscema) and Deadpool: Suicide Kings #5 (Mike McKone with Morry Hollowell). I like the newer one better myself, though they both get the point of villainous triumph across. Still, the mood of Spectacular is undercut by the yellow color. Sure, it's kind of a sickly yellow, like the book has hepatitis, but compared to Suicide Kings with its dark red, it lacks menace. 

Also, McKone and Hollowell titled Tombstone's head slightly downward, which lets them add some shadows to enhance the menace of the grin even further. I almost feel like he's leering up at me, ready to pounce. It's disquieting, because he seems to be looking up at us, so we should be in a position of power, but nothing about his face suggests that. instead, it looks like he's ready to do to us, what he just finished doing to Deadpool. 

Plus, the story in Spectacular Spider-Man (titled "Death by Tombstone") introduced Tombstone's leather outfit (including leather boots, leather pants, and a leather shirt with plunging neckline and really high collar), which I am not a fan of. I like super-powered mobsters that dress like classic mobsters, dagnabit! I understand a suit is the sort of outfit one might not want to get dirty, and that's difficult to avoid if you like to kill and torture people with your hands, as Tombstone did, but that's part of the appeal. You wouldn't expect a man dressed so nicely to be eager to snap your neck, or to be capable of doing so. 

Tombstone had operated under an odd moral code, at least as far as Robbie Robertson was concerned, and the classic mobster look evokes that idea of organized crime having certain rules. It can still be ruthless and horrifying, but there were certain lines not crossed. I can't remember the details of this story, so maybe Tombstone's methods had changed, and that's why they shifted his taste in clothes, but the look still costs it points with me. There's also the matter of Deadpool's teeth and gums showing through one of the holes in the mask, but I'm not holding the lack of that against the Buscema cover. It fits into the darker sort of humor you get with Deadpool, a character that can survive his head being exploded by a sniper round, but probably wouldn't work with Spider-Man. Certainly not in the early '90s.