Hardy Boys Covers

November 17, 2015 7:30 AM

Hardy Boys Covers
posted by josher71 (35 comments total)

Damn I was hoping these would be Kate Beaton's takes like she did for Nancy Drew

Nancy Drew 1
Nancy Drew 2
Nancy Drew 3
Nancy Drew 4
posted by jcruelty at 7:32 AM on November 17, 2015 [25 favorites]

This one though. In tears, these are so good.
posted by Fizz at 7:35 AM on November 17, 2015

Well those are terr—oh man, the Billy Corgan one is the best thing ever.
posted by goatdog at 7:37 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

"The Needy Hug Demon" might be my favorite.
posted by Kitteh at 7:41 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Oh, man, I would read the crap out of The Man Who Wouldn't Be Knighted.
posted by Etrigan at 7:41 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Liartown did a great Hardy Boys cover too
posted by clockzero at 7:47 AM on November 17, 2015 [7 favorites]

Dan Aykroyd's Vodka Cave.

You guys owe me a new keyboard.
posted by prepmonkey at 7:47 AM on November 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

I read most of the Hardy Boys books when I was a kid, but these are definitely improvements on the originals.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:48 AM on November 17, 2015

Blasphemy!
posted by fairmettle at 7:59 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Now someone needs to write new Hardy Boy Mysteries based solely on these parody titles. Just take my fucking money!?!
posted by Fizz at 8:02 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm going for The Forest Where Gravity Didn't Affect Cats. I mean, as long as the cats weren't rocketing away into space or anything, that could be pretty cute. Although it would make hiding the cat treats more of a problem.
posted by Frowner at 8:05 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Although really It Just Had To Be The Dragon is clearly some kind of slash fiction AU that crosses a Regency setting (balloonists!) with Pern and some real-person-fic chess thing - maybe a Prince Regent/Bobby Fisher kind of story; or maybe it's an X-men chess-playing thing but with dragons and a balloon? Maybe the dragon is also a mutant? And they're whirled back through time to 1810?
posted by Frowner at 8:13 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

jcruelty: "Damn I was hoping these would be Kate Beaton's takes like she did for Nancy Drew

Nancy Drew 1

Dammit, you almost got me fired. I was wasting time before an urgent meeting, and the one where Nancy Drew opens the book to a bunch of dick drawings made me laugh out loud.

If my boss and his boss didn't find it as funny as I did, I'd be trying to cash an unemployment check right now. Lucky that she grew up on Nancy Drew books like I did.

I harbor an unabashed love for Kate Beaton.
posted by Sphinx at 8:17 AM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]

Although really It Just Had To Be The Dragon is clearly some kind of slash fiction AU that crosses a Regency setting (balloonists!) with Pern and some real-person-fic chess thing

Excuse you but any regency dragon related stuff would CLEARLY be Temeraire.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:22 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm going for The Forest Where Gravity Didn't Affect Cats.

I think that should have been called It's Unwise to Be Tiny around Cats.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:31 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Mystery of the Racist Roller Coaster
posted by mcmile at 8:32 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

THESE ARE SO GOOD
posted by shakespeherian at 8:56 AM on November 17, 2015

My problem is the "Hardy Boys" logos on these books are way too 'modern'. In the 18th Century when I was growing up, all the Hardy books looked like this, with the boring serif text and THE HARDY BOYS in a contrasting color. Another thing the old old editions had was a distinctive spine design with the blue background and the little picture of the Boys, so we could differentiate them from the Nancy Drew books which had yellow spines with Nancy's picture allowing us to separate the "boys'" books from the "girls'" books, even when they were written by the same people using different pen-names (at least they didn't do Nancy's books in pink).
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:29 AM on November 17, 2015 [10 favorites]

Never bring a gun to a kick fight!
posted by XMLicious at 9:38 AM on November 17, 2015

My problem is the "Hardy Boys" logos on these books are way too 'modern'.

Same here. I think the reason most of these strike me as less-than-hilarious is because that crappy 80s (and 90s) mass market paperback aesthetic doesn't really take itself seriously enough to be effectively mocked. (Though I'm sure it's different for people who grew up devouring these editions of the books.)

On the other hand, the Kate Beaton comics linked up-thread really hit the sweet spot for me. (It probably also helps that she's apparently some kind of mad genius, and I now want to lap up everything she's ever done. Thanks for the heads up, jcruelty.)
posted by Atom Eyes at 10:02 AM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

A Ghost in the Closet: A Nancy Clue and Hardly Boys Mystery by Mabel Maney (one of her series of queer parodies.)
posted by larrybob at 11:01 AM on November 17, 2015

The Poorly Made Sword

and

The Boat That Couldn't Swim

Ha ha ha ha
posted by nzero at 11:38 AM on November 17, 2015

I object to this one.
posted by chapps at 12:12 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh god, I really couldn't get into this for the same reasons as oneswellfoop and atom eyes above. But then I got to The Rambo That Sucked.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:42 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Don't miss the link to True Snapple Facts.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 12:43 PM on November 17, 2015

Oh man this is so great. Don't miss The Battle of the Chiropractors
posted by JDHarper at 1:11 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Another thing the old old editions had was a distinctive spine design with the blue background and the little picture of the Boys, so we could differentiate them from the Nancy Drew books which had yellow spines with Nancy's picture allowing us to separate the "boys'" books from the "girls'" books, even when they were written by the same people using different pen-names (at least they didn't do Nancy's books in pink).

And Tom Swift books were orange
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 1:51 PM on November 17, 2015

A Dining Room, but for Slapping

Varsity Dressage

THE UNCONVENTIONAL MAILMAN

<3 <3 <3
posted by psoas at 2:16 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

These titles were great, and I recognize farrrrr too many of these covers for comfort.

Space? Really? Fine.
posted by infinitewindow at 2:21 PM on November 17, 2015

How old are the Hardy Boys meant to be? When I was a kid they looked like grown-ups on the covers. Looking at the art now, most of them look like men in their early 20s, but coooould be late teens I guess...

(For some reason I thought they were supposed to be kids in early teens. Who was reading that stuff? IIRC I was probably about 10 when I was into those sorts of kids-having-adventures series books)
posted by anonymisc at 3:30 PM on November 17, 2015

My problem is the "Hardy Boys" logos on these books are way too 'modern'. In the 18th Century when I was growing up, all the Hardy books looked like this, with the boring serif text and THE HARDY BOYS in a contrasting color. Another thing the old old editions had was a distinctive spine design with the blue background and the little picture of the Boys

Those are the ones I had, too, if I remember aright -- a complete hardcover set, I think, but the backgrounds on mine were a little darker blue. Not sure how old I would have been -- they led me into Doc Savage, and then into science fiction when I got a couple years older, so I'm thinking maybe like 8 or 9 years old, early 70s.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:07 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

MeFi's own mightygodking supplies my yardstick for this sort of thing: The Loneliest Manticore.
posted by speedo at 8:09 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

anonymisc: "For some reason I thought they were supposed to be kids in early teens. Who was reading that stuff? IIRC I was probably about 10 when I was into those sorts of kids-having-adventures series books"

I'm pretty sure they were supposed to be mid-to-late teens. They weren't in college, but Chet drove them around in his jalopy, so I always figured them as juniors or seniors in high-school (age 17 or 18).

I actually liked the new logos because I've never seen any Hardy Boys books other than the ones from when I was a kid: hardbound, blue-spined, looking like they were from the 1950s even though I was probably reading them in the early 1980s. So seeing the logos, and the hair, and the clothes on these covers, it was like "Whoa! 1960s Hardy Boys!" "Whoa, that's so 1970s!" "Man, that's totally 80s!" all in one big wallop.
posted by Bugbread at 10:29 PM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Isn't one of the rules of kids and young adult books that kids want to read about people slightly older than themselves, and definitely not kids younger than themselves, because that is childish?
posted by larrybob at 5:17 PM on November 18, 2015

'Reverse Old Yeller' made me blurt out in laughter.
posted by Fig at 3:33 PM on November 22, 2015