Final “Goodnight Batcave” Cover and a Review!

Last week I mentioned that the new MAD book I did with author Dave Croatto had the release date moved up to October 25th (formerly November 8th). In that post I mentioned that the cover of the book (and a couple of interior pages) that had previously been released as a preview were not the final artwork… those were “preview” images and ended up being tweaked before going to press. I also mentioned I could not show anyone the actual final cover art until it got formally released by the publisher.

Well, Barnes and Noble have the final cover up on their order page for the book, so it’s officially out there now… I have posted it above. As of this posting Amazon.com hasn’t gotten around to updating the book’s order page yet. Here’s the early prototype cover again:

As you can see, Batman has become more cartoony and simplified (although he’s still too big to actually fit into the batmobile he’s leaning on… hey, it’s a silly kids book! The city skyline/horizon is also missing from the window… call it “artistic license” and move on!) The batmobile got tweaked a bit and the little bat character added in is a nod to Wally Wood‘s “Batboy and Rubin” parody. He’ll be making an appearance or two inside (the little bat, not Wally).

On top of all that, the final book must have been released to select reviewers because the first review is in! Amelia Wellman over at Rogues Portal has some nice things to say about the book, although her one complaint is that it “isn’t entirely in color”, and she’s not sure why. Clearly she has never read the original Goodnight Moon, or she’d know it alternates between full color spreads with a bleed and individual black and white single page vignette spot illustrations. Capturing the look and rhythms of the targeted material is part of what a parody is supposed to do, hence both the color and black and white art.

I’m looking forward to the book’s release. It was fun to work on and I think it turned out pretty good. Dave wrote a clever and funny script and the art really came together, with lots of little MAD touches here and there.