If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if a vintage postcard collection got into a bar fight with a public domain clipart folder, behold the chaos that is The Rover: Early Adventures of Charles “Doc” Noble. This cover is a rootin’-tootin’ rodeo of graphic design offenses—like the Wild West exploded onto a blank PowerPoint slide and no one cleaned up the mess.
Let’s start with the main attraction: Cowboy McYellowcoat. He’s the only figure granted the dignity of a full torso and a horse, but somehow still looks like he wandered in from a spaghetti western-themed fashion shoot. His stoic thousand-yard stare says, “I regret this cover,” and honestly, we do too.
Surrounding him is a hodgepodge of floating historical hallucinations. There’s a paddle steamer, a lady with a pistol, a circus act of tiny horsemen, and what appears to be a bootleg Oregon Trail stagecoach escaping a Crayola-colored explosion of grass. Each element looks like it was copied and pasted from a different decade, resized with no regard for scale, and arranged by a designer who closed their eyes and said, “Let the spirits guide me.”
Let’s talk composition. Actually, let’s not, because there isn’t one. This isn’t a design—it’s a Western-themed junk drawer. There’s no focal point, no depth, and no logic to how the characters interact. One woman’s face appears to be emerging from a goat. A man in blue points dramatically at… nothing in particular. It’s a collection of moments screaming, “Look at me!” with no narrative to tie them together. It’s like flipping through a deck of cowboy trading cards and then gluing all your favorites to the same page.
The typography is doing its best to assert order, but it’s fighting a losing battle. “THE ROVER” screams in red caps like it’s announcing a high school mascot, while the subtitle attempts to sound literary but ends up feeling like a Wikipedia heading. And at the bottom, the author’s name floats on a sea of mismatched genre signals, as if even it wants to distance itself from the visual rodeo above.
If The Rover promises “Early Adventures,” the cover delivers “Early Attempts at Graphic Design.” There’s a charm to wanting to evoke pulp Western nostalgia—but nostalgia isn’t an excuse for design chaos. This isn’t a tribute to the old west. It’s a chaotic tumble through every Western trope ever printed, run through a scanner, and left to fend for itself in the wilderness of bad taste.
Somewhere out there, Charles “Doc” Noble is riding into the sunset—just to get away from this cover.