What makes the best comic book covers? It is a great topic for debate. For us, as individuals, there is no wrong answer, of course; it is purely subjective. But, with a little thought it’s possible to explain what it is about a particular image that grabs you. The best images are the ones that make you stop and check out something you weren’t previously planning to purchase – and in some cases, you even end up picking up a title you’ve never even heard of before.

Way before Valiant Vision in the 1990s and the 3-D effects inside The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Tempest in the 2010s, Eclipse Comics offered readers and comic book fans three-dimensional versions of some of the publisher’s best-received titles. One of these was Scott McCloud’s Destroy!!, which like his Zot!, brought the Japanese anime style to the US and its manga-hungry readers years before Viz, Tokyopop, and Seven Seas Entertainment, among others.    

With “three-dee” glasses attached within the binding of the comic book, this special issue really comes alive because of its in-your-face cover that gives readers a solid and hilarious head’s up to what lies within. Ultraviolence kicked up to extremes, it is the classic hero fighting against hero – and that’s all it is. But it also teaches us that violence is only a means to an end – and that the end definitely does not justify the means!

A hard-to-find collectible, and just waiting to be slabbed by an ambitious collector, this is a must for fans of comics, anime, and the art of sequential storytelling in general.

-Scott Braden