Judging a Book By Its Cover: The Story of the Goosebumps Cover Art

October 14, 2024

While the stories of Goosebumps are iconic, arguably even more so is the incredible cover art that adorns each one. Seeing the art, for me at least, invites waves of nostalgia (and just a hint of fear). But did you know that each and every cover is an original painting created predominately by one man?

Tim Jacobus, the artist behind almost all of the original covers, was a career cover artist whose big break came with the 1985 The Great Thirst by William Duggan. While the cover’s subject matter is vastly different to what would make his art globally recognised, the colour theory, dimension and striking detail speak to his memorable art style.

But Jacobus wasn’t the only option - Scholastic had sent a book each to two artists - Jacobus and Jim Thiesen. Thiesen was given Stay Out of the Basement while Jacobus was given Welcome to Dead House.

So what made the team at Scholastic pick Jacobus (depsite R.L. Stine being on the record saying that Thiesen’s cover is one of this favourites)? In large part, the high colour saturation combined with the dramatic perspective was what edged him out.

Jacobus, when planning his covers and the unique perspective has said,“I really like doing that worm’s eye view thing where basically, you’re on the ground looking up, that makes everything big and looming and intimidating. Kids are little, and the whole world is intimidating so that played into it.”

Scholastic also had concerns about the realism of Thiesen’s work - with R.L. Stine saying that “Tim captured just the right level of scariness for the age group. We didn’t really want to terrify kids - but we did want to excite them with our covers.” So while they loved Thiesen's art, Jacobus was the final decision. Thiesen continued to work on cover art, notably to this millennial, the I Am Legend cover, as well as his own fine art in a dread inducing surrealist style.

As a career artist, consistent work is a welcome relief, so Jacobus was delighted when he got the offer for the next few books. Soon R.L. Stine and Jacobus’s work became almost symbiotic with Stine saying “...his covers captured the humor of the stories as well as the horror. It’s one thing to be scary - but it’s much harder to be funny at the same time.” Despite this impressively cohesive work, Jacobus would often only be given a paragraph summary of the book before beginning his design and had worked on the books for at least two years before meeting the author himself.

The book series was on a monthly release schedule, which in the era before AI seems like a whole lot of work for both writer and artist, but Jacobus enjoyed the fast pace and managed, in usually a week, to go from thumbnail sketches to the final painting. All covers were done with acrylic paints applied first with a sable brush before being finished with an airbrush to create that iconic smooth style.

While things usually went smoothly, Jacobus notes one disappointing instance when due to the tight schedule, Scholastic wanted changes to the Let’s Get Invisible cover, and an unknown inhouse artist added additional elements without Jacobus’s input. “That’s the one thing that bugged me about the piece,” he says “is that somebody drew on my painting.”

Despite the success, nothing lasts forever, and almost as quickly as it took off it all ended. They “were doing the Goosebumps 2000 series, and I was 95 percent of the way through a cover.” Jacobus says. “Then they called me up and said ‘Yeah, don’t turn it in.’”

Despite this era of cover illustrations being over, Jacobus’s legacy continues with the 2015 Goosebumps film paying homage to his work overtly (with him designing a book cover in the film and the artwork for the soundtrack) and more subtly with Will Blake wearing Converse (Jacobus featured Converse sneakers approximately thirteen times on various covers).