Covers - an important part of Don Rosa's work

Don Rosa's comics production is more than just doing great stories. Another important part of his work is to do covers. Besides doing covers for most of his own stories, he has also done a lot of covers for stories by other artists – mostly his own great idol, Carl Barks. However, the Scandinavian editors have only used his covers for his own stories.

When asked about how it is to do covers compared to do stories he says: Covers don't involve scripts or storytelling, etc. It's as different as is filming a full movie from just creating the poster that advertises the movie. The first intention is to show an actual scene from the story that will look interesting or intriguing or exciting. But quite often there are no such single scenes because the story is based more on a chain of events rather than a single event. Then the intention becomes to "tell a lil' white lie" and show different elements of the story together though not actually exactly the way they appear in the story... but *never* to lead someone to believe that there is something happening in the story that they will not actually find when they read it. Perhaps the heroes face this villain or this situation, though not exactly as I show it or not just when I show it... or I show several things happening together that actually don't.

Covers are always done *after* I finish the story. But I sometimes am told right away by Egmont that they need a cover, and sometimes there have been stories that I did a cover for years later. It all depends on when some publisher decides they need one.

When asked if he automatically does a cover for every story he says: I only do a cover when somebody tells me they *want/need* a cover because it's a LOT of work and naturally I'd need to get paid for that much worktime. So I never do a cover "just for fun". Besides, they aren't much fun... they are rather boring. A cover just involves drawing a picture and I don't like to draw! It's hard work and I don't think I do it very well! I prefer telling stories, so I'd HATE to do nothing but cover illos! It's sometimes fun to do a cover for a story I like, especially if I come up with a good idea... but only because I know that it will be about 3 months before anyone will ask me for another cover.