Comic review: My Little Pony Cover Gallery

Rarity at the centre of attention. Of course

This is not the comic review Louder Yay deserves, and in all honesty it's probably not the one it needs right now either. Unfortunately, no British comic shop seems to have the Cutie Mark Crusaders micro that was supposed to come out this week. (You can get it via Comixology, and I have done just that, so there'll be a review of some sort here next week... but that's not much use to those who were hoping to get a physical copy signed at BUCK!) Anyway, back to the Cover Gallery, which for a change I bought in Coventry's Forbidden Planet. It cost £3.15, the same as a regular issue. Past the jump for more!

The Cover Gallery is a 36-page publication in exactly the same dimensions as the regular issues. Each page contains a cover design, which covers the entire page apart from a small top-corner flash giving the name of the artist who drew it. Big Mac's recent Andy Price cover has his speech bubble removed, too. Surprisingly, one or two covers from yet-to-be-released comics are included: the inside front cover, for example, depicts the Andy Price cover for issue #10 that a lot of people — including me — have been enthusing about ever since the first preview appeared.

Approximately eight million times cheaper than buying the original

I don't know how IDW decided which covers to include: the blurb on the back cover — which, like the front, bears a textured and glittery MLP logo — claims that "beloved, rare, hard-to-find and fan-favorite" covers are here, but that's pushing it. While at least one (the Pinkie Transformers cover that was sold exclusively at BotCon) falls into all four categories, some of them seem to push the definitions a little bit. For example, the nice but not exceptional A and B covers from the Applejack micro are both included.

It's notable that the cover bears the legend "#1", strongly implying that there'll be more of these gallery books in the future. Considering that everything Pony that IDW touches seems to turn to gold, this probably makes a fair amount of sense commercially. However, is this book worth buying? I'd give a slightly lukewarm yes — but it's not an instant must-have like The Elements of Harmony. It's probably the only way you'll get the BotCon cover in print at a sensible price, but on its own merits the Cover Gallery isn't as exciting a purchase as the Treasury Edition.

Princess Fluttershy? Hmm... hay, Celestia! Can I have a word?

Yays

• Always nice to see cover art free of branding, mastheads etc
• Several of the covers are hard to get hold of...
• ...in particular that Pinkie BotCon one!

Neighs

• A lot of the covers included are pretty standard ones
• It has the CMC covers, but I still can't get that comic; grr!

6.5/10

And now I'm off to BUCK!