Maybe I'm biased as a comics fan of a certain age, but I often feel like everyone is nostalgic for corner box art on comics covers, even those who weren't necessarily buying comics when those little boxes were a staple. For the uninitiated, I'm talking about the little rectangle in the upper left corner of a comics cover, which would feature some manner of portrait of the book's main characters. While many comics companies had corner boxes, they're most associated with Marvel (probably because DC never really got into them).

Originally, the idea was that comics were crowded onto newsstands, so only the very edge of a cover could be seen. So corner boxes were a way to convey what a reader could expect from a book before they got a look at the whole cover. As newsstands stopped being a prime source for comics, the corner boxes stuck around for a while as a purely stylistic element, but in time they mostly died out, other than as deliberate attempts to evoke and homage the past.

 

Marvel Comics, via CBR
Marvel Comics, via CBR
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But now we've learned, via CBR, that the ResurrXion relaunch of the X-Men line will reintroduce corner books on the covers of those books. They won't be rectangles however; they'll be triangles that fit within the "X" that appears prominently in the corner of each cover. But each one still highlights the stars of the book, so the purpose is the same, even if these comics are less likely to be found overlapping on sidewalk newsstands. All of the corner box art has been done by the same team --- artist Leonard Kirk and colorist Michael Garland --- to give the "boxes" the same look across the line. ResurrXion is clearly an effort to get the X-Men back to what fans used to love about them, and bringing back corner boxes really drives that home.

You can check out more of the corner boxes over on CBR to see how they'll look with the full cover, or just wait a few months until ResurrXion begins to see for yourself.

 

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