Coolest Comic Covers: Lady Penelope and Joe 90

When it came to cover designs for comics, Century 21 produced some excellent ones for City Magazines. The flagship title TV Century 21 was groundbreaking with its futuristic newspaper design of course, but the comic's companion titles looked great too. For example, above is the cover to Lady Penelope No.1 from January 1966. Its contemporary style instantly made other girls comics look old fashioned. (And the cover design would change from week to week just to keep it looking fresh.)

Even Joe 90 Top Secret looked more exciting and modern than most other boys comics when it was launched in January 1969. Here's the cover to issue one, with artwork on the strip by Frank Bellamy...

The interesting thing is that Century 21 didn't follow what IPC, DC Thomson, Odhams, or anyone else were doing with cover design. They ignored formula and did their own thing. Admittedly Joe 90 didn't last long but both TV21 and Lady Penelope had respectable runs. Cool-looking comics for the coolest decade.

(By the way, I don't have copies of these issues but the adverts for them in TV21 were clear and sharp enough so I scanned those, enlarged them, and cropped off the advertising stuff that was around the cover images.)