Last year, Marvel Comics married comics and hip-hop with a series of 50 variant covers that recreated album covers of influential rap and hip-hop albums. With the success they saw with Spider-Man paying homage A Tribe Called Quest and Ant-Man taking on Notorious B.I.G’s Ready to Die, Marvel is unveiling another wave of hip-hop variant covers ahead of San Diego Comic Con.
Fuse broke the news, along with the first three covers that are a part of it. The first three unveiled covers pay homage to younger artists, rather than the classics that the first wave paid tribute to. “Black Panther” #7, illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz, will take on King Mez’s Long Live The King, “Doctor Strange” #1, by Theotis Jones, works on Desiigner’s Panda, and “Mosaic” #1, by Marco D’Alfonso, pays tribute to Earl Sweatshirt’s debut mixtape. “It’s about two creative art forms shouting out to each other,” Marvel editor-in-chief Axel Alonso tells Fuse. “Hip-hop is the backbeat for any number of people who are writing, drawing and editing these comic books.”
King Mez is seemingly very much on board with this, saying, “Growing up a huge comic book fan, it was a dream to come true to even be a part of this. Black Panther at that? Mannn, it was automatic when Marvel reached out. Really cool way to have LLTK immortalized like that. Hope we get to do a variant collab on my new project too.”
The first round of variant covers drew both a lot of support from fans of both hip-hop and comics and a lot of controversy from those that felt the initiative was nothing more than an attempt to cash in on cultural appropriation, especially from a company that employed a disproportionately low amount of minorities. Whether this round will have more goodwill behind remains to be seen, but we can probably agree that those covers are looking pretty good so far.
