All throughout July we’re crowdsourcing an Extra Eisners Reading List from comics journalists and critics. Each weekday throughout the month, we’ll post a new pick we would have liked to have seen nominated for an Eisner. There are so many great comics, it’s impossible for the Eisners to recognize them all. This list is to honor and diversify the pool of work praised by the industry.

Today’s pick comes from Justin Patridge…enjoy!

One of the great unspoken laws of comics is “in-house style” sucks on ice. You know it. I know it. Even your older brother’s friend who still wears the jean vest and swears by his holocovers of the 90’s Rai knows it, though he would be caught dead on the train tracks before he would admit it. 

But that didn’t stop Tom Muller from quietly exploding the whole concept with his elegant and instantly evocative design scheme for Dawn of X. 

Melding the high concept, grid obsessed sensibilities of “showrunner” Jonathan Hickman and razor sharp mastheads, trade dress, and branding logos, Muller’s designs and compositions screamed NEW and BOLD from the house ads and then just gotten better as the books started appearing on shelves.

But while consistently beautiful and striking, Muller also provided something Marvel’s mutants had been needing for years since; structure, unity, and above all, clarity. That clarity is currently breaking the internet AGAIN, AS I TYPE as Muller’s logos and trade dress for the upcoming X OF SWORDS event are being released into the wilds of X-Twitter, delineating a clear path through the event with even more striking, unique, and CLEARLY MARKED trade dress and issue markers.

While DC struggled to find a common voice in its monthly issue designs and various other third-party publishers failed to find a united look and calling mark to set it apart on the shelves, Tom Muller broke it down to a science with nothing but a few hard angles and a keen point of view on the new “gods” of Krakoa. -Justin Partridge

Justin Patridge is a writer for hire with bylines at Newsarama, Dis/Member, and Rogue’s Portal. You can reach him at justin@betweenthepanels.com.

Tom Muller is an Eisner and Harvey Award nominated creative director. You can learn more about his work at hellomuller.com.

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Check out the official Eisner Nominations for 2020.