Homage Variant Cover: Aliens

An Homage Variant with Humor

As stated in my previous post, the regular cover to Trophy Girls #3 is a tribute to Michael Nesmith. For the variant I wanted to pay homage to the 1986 movie Aliens. Aliens stars Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley and, in my opinion, is one of the toughest women in cinematic history! This sequel to Alien, Ripley must now defeat the Xenomorphs who have taken over a colony. As a result she finds herself protecting a young girl, Newt, the last survivor on the planet.  In addition, the group of highly trained colonial marines, accompanying her, couldn’t even defeat the Aliens! Ultimately, Ripley is so badass that she kicks-ass!

In my homage variant I put a bit of humor in it and therefore will not point out the joke. That is to say, I hope that by now you have already seen the movie and will get the joke. This homage variant cover is brilliantly done by Cliff Richards (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Action Comics, Birds of Prey) and Michael Bartolo. (again with the assistance of David Campiti from Glass House Graphics). As with past variant covers of  Trophy Girls, this one is extremely limited and once they’re gone, they’re gone!

Homage variant covers are very popular in the world of modern age comics. Paying tribute to musicians, album covers, television shows, movies, or other iconic comic book covers. I have already planned for both covers to Trophy Girls issue #4 to be an homage to a piece of pop culture in both mine and Crystal’s life.  Sadly, there are some who feel that these homage covers are flooding the market making it so that they;re not so rare or valuable. While, I can understand why many would think this, I of course, disagree because the covers for Trophy Girls reflect a small part of our life.

Homage variant covers should not be confused with a “cover swipe“, when an artist intentionally copies another artists cover, interior page, or panel from a different comic and doesn’t credit the original artist. Surprisingly this is very common among artists although some more notorious than others. There is also cover parody which is exactly as it sounds. A perfect example is my story Bible VS: The Virgin Mary vs God a parody on the biblical birth of Jesus Christ.