Some of The Dumbest Covers I Have Ever Done

 October 11, 2024

   It isn't often we take stock of our failures, but here's a partial listing of my biggest regrets in publishing, so far.

The Dumbest Covers I Have Ever Done

   Normally, I would say "the dumbest covers we have ever done" because I believe in the edict that it's truly amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit, but these covers were my idea from the get go and I won't share any of the resulting embarrassment with my comrades in graphic design. Here's the first boneheaded one, done early in our ownership of the magazine.

One of The Dumbest Covers Ever #1

   I think it was Marcus Huff who found this weird old photo of a guy posing with a skeleton. It think it was an 1850s image. Someone, probably the sitter, was so embarrassed by this he put a postage stamp over his own head to hide his identity. That's just a guess. Why we would run this—on the cover!—is beyond me today. Well, maybe not beyond, because I green lit it, but dang, I wish I had this one back.

   Same with this next one.

One of The Dumbest Covers Ever #2

   One of our writer's room jokes is that in the old days, True West featured a dead man in every issue. But on the cover! This flirts dangerously close to death porn and I wish I had it back, but it's dead to me. Sorry, and the "Craps Out" line is a total groaner.

One of The Dumbest Covers Ever #3

   Known internally as the "Savior With No Name Cover" this is, well, dang close to blasphemous, although Jana's piece inside was very respectful of Christendom out West.

One of The Dumbest Covers Ever #4

  The premise was not bad: would you pay $500,000 for this little piece of tin? And we thought it would be great to show the tintype at the actual size. This runs counter to the Ten Foot Rule: if you are walking by a newsstand and you are ten feet away and you can't see what is on the cover, you are going to die. And this cover did just that. Also, to rub salt into the wound, all the photo experts we talked to thought a half mil was close to lunacy and the absolute ceiling of what a sane person would pay for the picture so imagine everyone's surprise when Bill Koche paid $2.3 million for the only known photo of Billy the Kid!

One of the Dumbest Covers Ever #5

   Known internally as "Bring Me The Head of The Idiot Who Came Up With This Cover". In my defense, Paul Andrew Hutton and I were immersed in the Mickey Free story and we thought this Weird West angle would light up the switchboards, which it did, but with complaints from mothers everywhere who wanted us put in jail!

   There's actually one more, but I'll save that bad boy for tomorrow.

"Study the past if you want to know what the idiots are going to do next."

—Old Vaquero Saying