Over the course of the last four months, Marvel has periodically released well-known hip hop album covers reimagined as comic book covers, featuring the various characters from the Marvel universe. On January 6, at participating stores, Marvel will give away a 32-page comic book that features 14 of the variant covers.
Axel Alonso, editor in chief of Marvel, and his team of artists conceived the variant covers in order to generate buzz for over fifty No.1 issues that Marvel started releasing last month.
“The Marvel hip-hop cover announcement came at a time when the publisher’s publicly known creator lineup was still lacking in black and Latino writers,” Joseph Phillip Illidge of Comic Book Resources told the NY Times. "The bigger issue is the lasting promise of Marvel’s commitment to diversity, which is of greater import and impact than the Avengers posing like the Roots."
Keep an eye out for info as to where you can procure the limited edition variant covers reprint. Check out a few of the best covers in the gallery above, and click on the links below to explore the entire collection of 50+ Marvel hip hop variant comic book covers released to date.
50 Cent X Ironman + more
Nas X Spiderman + more
Dr. Dre X Dr. Strange + more
N.W.A. X A-Force + more
Raekwon X Hulk + more
2Pac X Daredevil + more
Redman X Carnage + more
Vanilla Ice X Deadpool + more
[via]