Flash Gordon cover (1986) 🔗

It's your friendly neighborhood Flash Gordon! This UK home computer interpretation of the pulp icon (which did make its way back to the US without the license as Captain Zapp) goes back to the popular How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way well. Besides Spider-Man's swinging pose, Ming the Merciless in the background also originates here, from the disembodied head pronouncing chapter eight! Dale Arden and Dr. Hans Zarkov are not from here, but they seem comic book-ey to me as well.

After the initial release on the C64, subsequent ports had the colors and some of the poses changed for some reason, but certainly not enough to be legally distinct (and neither color scheme seems to match any iteration of the Flash Gordon franchise).

Castlevania cover (1986) 🔗

Frank Frazetta's The Norseman is one of the most frequently copied influences among games illustrators, and his appearance on the original Castlevania cover is already fairly well known. There's a few changes to his gait and left arm, and of course Simon Belmont is holding a very different weapon, but the influence is unmistakable. What's not talked about often (yet) is that Dracula's floating head apparently also taps another secret text of video game artists, namely John Buscema's How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, although it seems to be an amalgam of different images. While the grin and overall head shape comes from that grinning dude, the dark lord's hairline and ears more closely resemble Namor, who's sketched in the same book a couple pages earlier.