From post #54: “Even if he wasn’t aware of the franchise, surely it should be pretty obvious they’d want the alien on the cover to resemble the one’s on the interior.”

Hard to read the earlier statement as NOT saying that he had seen the interior.

I'm not sure why you think that. He knew there was going to be an interior, so it seems only sensible to find out what the ones on the interior look like. (sorry about that heinous rogue apostrophe in that bit of my post you quoted - I hate those)

As I said before though, I didn't realise that Kane was due to draw the interiors, so as long as he'd seen the script then that mistake is a lot more understandable.

From post #54: "Even if he wasn’t aware of the franchise, surely it should be pretty obvious they’d want the alien on the cover to resemble the one’s on the interior."

Hard to read the earlier statement as NOT saying that he had seen the interior.

Obviously--given what did in fact happen--Kane was not aware of the crossover, was not aware that the alien was to be the pre-existing property ALIEN, and thought he had the freedom to design an alien that worked within whatever specifics that he HAD been told of the plot. Maybe Gil's illness was already affecting his thought processes, but remember that Brian said he was hired by the Wildstorm/WildC.A.T.S. editor, not the Dark Horse/ALIEN editor, so I don't see that miscommunication as all that implausible.

Note also, the GCD DOES indicate that Kane's cover illio WAS printed on some copies, and that another by interior penciller Chris Sprouse was on others. Interestingly, they give primary credit to Spouse's, and list Gil's as "Sequence 1," but the scan posted is of the one Brian has up here. At first glance, I thought they meant that Kane's was rejected for the cover and reproduced inside the comic while a replacement by Sprouse was on the front of the book, but on close examination that doesn't seem to be their intent.

I think you're still missing the point though.

If they asked him to draw a character fighting an alien on the cover - regardless of whether it's an Alien (TM) or just any other of the many aliens you get in stories, I'd have thought Kane would realise that the one on the cover should resemble the ones on the interior.

I think either I'm misunderstanding you or you're misunderstanding me.

The most interesting difference between the pencils and inks on that Kane cover is the woman’s face - it’s great in the pencils, and horribly flat and generically 90’s-looking in the inks.

That's Kevin Nowlan's inks there. He's the only inker who's ever made me not hate Gil Kane's art.

Gil Kane didn’t screw up insomuch that he had never seen anything about the Alien movie, so he wasn’t aware that when they asked him to draw an ‘alien’, they meant an ‘Alien’. A miscommunication, not so much as a screw up.

I'm not sure I agree. Even if he wasn't aware of the franchise, surely it should be pretty obvious they'd want the alien on the cover to resemble the one's on the interior.

Also, I used to have quite a bit of love for the Robotman strip. The toy was marginal - a sort of 'My Little Robot' concept - but the strip was about as engagingly twisted a take on sci-fi cliches as you'll ever see.

The most interesting difference between the pencils and inks on that Kane cover is the woman’s face - it’s great in the pencils, and horribly flat and generically 90’s-looking in the inks.

Agreed, totally. I actually had a shock of disappointment when I scrolled down from the pencil drawing to the finished cover.

In practice, it seems that "name/logo on the cover" is the accepted standard for successfully asserting a trademark in comics (which helps explain a lot of "Marvel Team-Up" or "Secret Origins" selections, incidentally.) It's quite possible that Robotman had never so appeared at DC before the strip, thus putting his trademark into iffier territory.

thanks, Yiding! that makes more since now that i look at it again.