Covers Always Lie

aka: Posters Always Lie

The rootin'-tootin' banjo-pickin' high-flyin' cosmic adventure! Except not.

Monster in the Darkness: Wait— the scene on the cover didn't actually happen that way.
Demon-Roach: Welcome to show business, kid.

— The Stinger, The Order of the Stick: Start of Darkness

Don't judge a book by its cover — no, literally. Nor a video, a comic, or even a record. The cover is an essential part of the marketing plan. As is common in marketing, it can be an entirely inaccurate representation. It's not just the artwork that's misleading, either. The Blurb on the back may be even more disconnected from the story.

Popular characters who appear in little more than a cameo on the inside can be larger than the main character on the cover. A quiet, contemplative issue can be made to seem like an action-packed frag-fest, and vice-versa. The cover can push for an entirely different demographic than the rest of the work. This is often done intentionally so customers will purchase the product assuming that it relates to their interests in a visual version of Follow the Leader, as commonly found in The Mockbuster.

Film Posters and video packaging are particularly likely to mislead if it's an independent film, or a film in a genre that the marketing people assume most people are unlikely to appreciate. For example, an intelligently-written mystery for the whole family may have a cover that implies it's a comedy, or a family film that happens to have a dog in it may emphasize the dog on the cover. See also Never Trust a Trailer.

In non-graphic literature, it is not uncommon for a female character to be portrayed in a Stripperiffic outfit when they would wear nothing of the sort in the story - assuming the character is even in the story. Also, virtually any Speculative Fiction book will have either a rocket or an alien of some sort on the cover, and dragons are commonly used on Fantasy, High Fantasy and Sword and Sorcery books, even if there is no dragon in the story at all. (Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo are particularly noteworthy as artists whose paintings make great book covers, but only occasionally actually relate to the contents of the books.)

This trope also applies to album covers, especially singles, which often get their own album art, for one or two songs.

The chances of this happening are magnified many times over when the game has to jump the national boundary. Especially in the pre-internet era, it wasn't at all uncommon to see the localization team (who may not actually be all that familiar with the work in question) creating a new cover from wholecloth, and said cover had about a 50-50 shot of looking nothing whatsoever like the actual product.

A related subtrope is the practice of creating the cover first, and writing the story based on that. This was common practice for comic books, especially at DC, during The Silver Age of Comic Books under editor Julius Schwartz, and was responsible for some of the weirdest stories of the time. However, it would sometimes result in a story that went off in a totally different direction and disposed of the cover situation in a panel or two. The website Superdickery features many strange, silly and inane covers of this kind.

Finally, in some cases, it may result from using stuff that was never meant to be a cover. A classic example is concept art, which can end up way off-base from the final product, but still look nice enough and roughly similar enough to be pressed into service as such.

This has occasionally gotten a lampshade hung on it, as evidenced here,◊ here and here.

Many of these overlap with Sexy Packaging, and often feature Lady Not-Appearing-in-This-Game or Advertised Extras. Compare with Never Trust a Trailer, Wolverine Publicity, Bait-and-Switch Credits, Superdickery, and Never Trust a Title.

For cover illustrations that whiten dark-skinned characters, see Race Lift. For in-book illustrations, see Unreliable Illustrator. For magazines that sometimes put a bit of skin on their cover even though the interior is about gaming, sports, or whatever, see Fanservice Cover.

Inverted Trope of Spoiler Cover, where the cover is so accurate that it gives away important points.

See also Book and Switch, when a book someone would be embarrassed to be seen reading is concealed by the cover of a totally different book.

Note: Covers lie a LOT. It happens all the time, even if only to prevent spoilers. So only put really interesting examples here now, not every cover that tells a little fib.

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Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
• Films — Animation
• Films — Live-Action
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Music
• Video Games
• Western Animation

Other examples:

Advertising

• Things like recipe books and food packaging have plenty of examples of this, featuring pictures of food made by professionals, presented to be as photogenic and appetizing as possible. Some food examples here.

Fan Works

• The fanfiction Pataki Magi Helga Magica (a crossover between Hey Arnold! and Puella Magi Madoka Magica), judging by the title name and the cover art, many readers would expect Helga to become an awesome Puella Magi who fights for love and justice. Not only she never become an active Puella Magi at all, she eventually make a wish to Kyubey so that she would never exist in that world to undo all the bad things that had already happened.
• The cover art for crossover fanfiction Wishes of a Different Sort features Homura Akemi and Freeza. While Homura is the main protagonist of the story and Freeza plays important roles as a threatening villain, Ultimate Kriemhild Gretchen is the true Big Bad of the story, making Freeza pale in comparison. And guess what, Homura is not the one who seal Gretchen away.
• Evangelion 303: One chapter is titled "The Death of Asuka Langley Sohryu". No, it does not come to pass.
• The header for Knowledge is Power says "Humor/Romance", but there's not much of either.
• The cover for a Secret of NIMH fanfic, Secret of the Stone, depicts Mrs. Brisby wearing her iconic amulet. Not only does she never use the amulet in the story, she is not even the main character.
• The cover art for Tealove's Steamy Adventure was deliberately made to be sort of accurate, but in a misleading way. For instance, a cave troll features in the story, while the cover includes Nepeta, who is a troll girl who lives in a cave, but otherwise has absolutely nothing to do with the story. Similarly, the cover of the "sequel", Diamond and Silver's Excellent Adventure contains nothing that actually appears in the story other than the two eponymous protagonists and implications of time travel.
• The fan fiction Mobile Fighter Evangelion was inspired by this occurrence: Word of God is that the author, when he was a kid, saw a poster of Neon Genesis Evangelion and assumed things about the Children (and the series as a whole) that were way different from the real thing. He then decided to endeavor to make a story worthy of the poster.
• The promo art for the Steven Universe fanfic Selaginella Lepidophylla has Rose Quartz hilariously carrying numerous tubs of ice cream and making a "cool" pun. But in context, this scene leads to one of the most heart-wrenching scenes of the story so far.
• The cover for the K-On! Palcomix comic On This Day has Rio and Mitsu posing very suggestively and looking at the camera. But the sex actually isn't the big thing in the story.
• How I Became Yours not only has scenes that don't happen on the cover, but it also has several fabricated positive reviews.
• Thirty Hs: not exactly a cover, but the most commonly circulated image used to summarise the insanity of the fic is a Photoshopped image of Harry Potter wielding a groin-mounted chainsaw. In the fic, he doesn't have one - it's Dobby who has the iconic "groinsaw".
• The Alternate Universe Fic Slice of Velvet and Pear has a cover that depicts Twilight Sparkle and Applejack as fillies, playing around their mothers, Twilight Velvet and Pear Butter, as they happily talk over tea. Implying the main focus will be on this period in the characters' lives and along with the title, that Twilight Velvet and Pear Butter will be mane characters. This is only true for the first few chapters. The bulk of the story takes place in during the events of the series proper. And while Twilight Velvet and Pear Butter do pop up throughout the story and the latter remains a prominent supporting character, their main contributions was their meeting (and their daughters becoming friends early) serving as the Point of Divergence for this story. Also, Moondancer, who is a mane character is no where to be seen on the cover or even the description.

Print Media

• Played with in the case of Álgebra by Cuban mathematician Aurelio Baldor, which is by far the most famous and widely used textbook used in Latin America. The cover◊ depicts Al-Juarismi, a Persian mathematician who lived in the 8th century. However, as the book is used mainly in high schools, a common misconception regarding the book is that the dude wearing the turban is Baldor. This is further exacerbated by the way the book is referred to, which is "Álgebra de Baldor" ("Baldor's Algebra"), the author's last name sounding Arabic in the first place, and by its famous cover art, so it's rather easy to make the mistake.

Pro Wrestling

• The VHS release of Slamboree 2000 sports a big picture of Jeff Jarrett and DDP. Fair enough. Strangely absent is the most important man on the show, Dave Arquette.
• Posters and DVD covers will often feature one of valets (or Faux Action Girls) holding a prop that symbolically has something to do with the theme of the show, but is otherwise irrelevant; the woman in question is often barely in the show, if at all. Even if a male wrestler's image is used, he might be shown wearing a silly themed costume (suggesting that the show will be laugh-a-minute) or depicted with inappropriate iconography. Famously, the poster for No Mercy in October 2007 showed Randy Orton holding a white dove on the cover, implying that he was about to turn face. (He didn't.) If he had turned face, that would have been the creepiest foreshadowing ever. Yeah, he was holding a dove, but his face!
• Kurt Angle was featured on the poster for TNA's Victory Road PPV in 2011... only to then not have a match, or a single second of screen time, on the show.

Tabletop Games

• The box for Space Crusade (HeroQuest set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe) depicts an elderly squad commander in entirely white armor with a gold emblem on his left shoulder plate. Not only does this character not exist in the game, the color scheme and emblem are not used by any chapter of the Legions Astartes.
• The old boxed sets for the Basic version of the Dungeons & Dragons game invariably showed a party of heroes engaged in glorious battle with a dragon of some description. The Basic D&D rules only provided information for advancement up to 3rd level, meaning that if your Basic-level adventurer met up with a dragon of any sort, the resulting Curb-Stomp Battle would wipe you out within a round or two.
  • The cover of the Elder Evils sourcebook depicts Kyuss, The Worm That Walks, smashing his way through a castle with a giant axe-mace weapon. In the book proper, Kyuss is fought on a largely untamed jungle island with one small ruined building, and doesn't bother with a weapon of any kind (he hardly needs one, mind you). Funnily, it's pretty accurate to the finale of the adventure "Age of Worms" (which Kyuss's section is pretty much a Broad Strokes remake of), which did take place in a city and had Kyuss wielding such a weapon. He's also depicted as far larger than he should be, but that's another trope.
• The original cover of Rifts depicts a Splugorth Slaver and the Altara Warrior Women. The Splugorth only got a brief mention from Erin Tarn and the Slaver+women didn't get stats published until sourcebook 1 / world book 2.
  • CB2 Pantheons shows a technological Thor who is never mentioned in the book.
  • DB2 Phase World shows a giant monster attacking Centre. The creature was never mentioned nor statted.
  • WB10 Juicer Uprising makes it seem like there is a way to shoot a hole through helmets without destroying them.
  • WB20 Canada shows the Tundra Rangers being part of the Coalition States, the book doesn't describe them working together.
• Critical Role: Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting: The cover art for the book shows the heroes of Critical Role doing battle with a massive green dragon, with the the Gunslinger Percy right in the foreground. Not only is this particular battle not described anywhere in the book, but the book also doesn't include statistics for dragons or the Gunslinger class. You'll need to get a Monster Manual for dragon statistics and then go the GM's Guild website to see the gunslinger class that Percy represents.

Theatre

• TFANA's production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Julie Taymor, featured a poster that made it look more like a psychological horror movie than... you know... one of the world's most beloved romantic comedies.
• The Be More Chill Broadway album booklet shows the entire cast onstage during "Halloween," including Michael in his costume. Michael is not present in that number; the audience doesn't even know he's at the party until two scenes later. The costume was a disguise to sneak into the party.
• Some posters and covers for The Crucible appear to show a romantic embrace between John Proctor (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Abigail Williams (Winona Ryder). While there is an affair between the two, it's done before the film even starts and Proctor detests Abigail for it so much that by the end he's willing to give up his own life to try to get her killed; when this fails and she tries to rescue him, Proctor tells Abigail he'd rather die than let her save him.
• The cover and poster art for Jasper in Deadland depicts Jasper wearing a dark blue zip-up hoodie. Jasper actually spends most of the show wearing Agnes's red hoodie.
• Latibær: The VHS cover for Glanni Glæpur Í Latabæ displays 3D models of the characters, despite the whole play being live-action.
• Sonic: Live in Sydney had Knuckles receive official art for the show, and is seen on the CD booklet, but he isn't featured in either version of the show.

Visual Novels

• Inverted with the cover of Virtue's Last Reward, which has Sigma with grey-ish hair and a shining right eye instead of black hair and a normal-looking eye. This foreshadows the fact that you're playing as his older self, a major reveal of the plot.
• Downplayed with the cover of the Danganronpa Compilation Re-release Danganronpa Decadence. The selection of characters on the box art isn't fully reflective of their actual importance within the series, including not just the protagonists and major antagonists, but several supporting characters who don't really contribute enough to the plot to merit their inclusion. The most egregious example is probably Hifumi, who gets the largest floating head on the cover despite not even making it to the halfway point of the first game and not being relevant at all in the following games.

Web Animation

• Etra chan saw it!: The thumbnail always splices together panels that weren't together originally and often alters dialogue in ways that are deliberately misleading. This partly serves as click-bait, but also serves to avoid spoiling the actual plot of the episode. Though the general rule of thumb is that anything in red text in the thumbnail is probably not something anyone actually said in the episode.
• Klay World: Off the Table. The DVD cover makes it look like one of those cheap, direct-to-video family movies. Although it IS cheap and direct-to-video, the language and violent (albeit cartoony) on-screen deaths proves that this ain't a kids flick. The writer/director lampshades this in one of the DVD commentaries.

Web Comics

• Penny Arcade's book covers (Volume 1◊ Volume 2,◊ Volume 3◊) all feature the two main characters, but that's about it. On the other hand, this may as good a way as any to represent the comic.
• Banner ads for Ménage à 3 do a thorough job of explaining that the comic features a lot of sex based jokes. Most of these ads are either Les Yay, or DiDi's "DDs". There is no indication that most of the comic is actually Ho Yay.

• The second Electric Wonderland comic has a cover page with Aerynn exclaiming, "I said I would shoot, but you didn't believe me! Why didn't you believe me??" She doesn't actually shoot anyone in that comic.
• Being an Interactive Comic, there's no way that the author of Awful Hospital would be able to perfectly predict the direction the story would take from the get-go. Regardless, the events taking place on the cover page◊ are vastly different from the actual story, the most notable difference being the presence of a character who wouldn't be met until over 600 pages in.
• Bound Adventures has a story where Princess Irina is captured by pirates. In the actual story she's just on the ship as it carries her to an enemy castle. The cover pages make it look as though Irina is forced to walk the plank, and then gobbled up by a shark.
• Banner ads for Sandra and Woo often display Zoey Irwin and reference that she's gay, suggesting the comic has LGBTQ themes. However, Zoey is a minor character who only shows up in a handful of strips, and is the only gay character in the comic.
• Sleepless Domain: Not the comic itself, but several chapters — usually the more lighthearted ones — feature cover art that places the characters in an Alternate Universe or another genre entirely, and only thematically relate to the events of the chapter. For example, the cover page for Chapter 8 depicts the two main characters as comic-book superheroes, while Chapter 17 shows the main ensemble in a monochrome private eye's office and attire out of a Film Noir set. The author's note on the cover of Chapter 7 (which features Undine and Kokoro in a boxing ring) lampshades this:
  "This MIGHT not depict events which literally occur in this chapter."
• Housepets! covers flip flop on whether they depict actual canon events (Like King dancing on a table or Tarot at Heaven's help desk, although even those feature characters not present in said scenes) or just whatever the author felt like drawing (Like Zach nearly being eaten, or a game show hosted by multiple Kitsunes and Cerberus).

Web Original

• Lampshaded during this review for Master of Magic. One of the reviews states "I knew it was a total flop, one could tell that just by looking at the box." Before the end of the video that same reviewer falls in love with the game.
• Rawry Probably's layering of Rain World: Downpour's "Threat - Waterfront Complex" non-diegetic ambience displays the aquatic Rivulet, the second latest Slugcat in the timeline. In the game, the Waterfront Facility region is a less-flooded version of Shoreline that's only accessible to the Spearmaster and Artificer, the first two (and among the most combative) Slugcats in the timeline.

Web Videos

• Dragon Ball Z Abridged has a very deliberate example — the pre-intro scene of episode 31 suggests that the series WILL be adapting the Garlic Jr arc, a much maligned filler arc; the intro for the episode even uses scenes from said arc. The majority of said episode focuses on Krillin and his girlfriend. Garlic Jr literally lasts less than a minute before being assimilated by Mr Popo.
• Lockstin & Gnoggin's videos about Pokémon types feature detailed analysis of all the Pokémon or the moves of that type, explaining why they are like that. The thumbnails for those videos suggest a completely different kind of video, as they usually feature a bunch of Pokémon of that type with "NOT <type>?" over them, suggesting that the videos talk about how some Pokémon don't fit at all their typings.
• The Nostalgia Chick's "Top 10 'Hottest' Animated Guys" bumper art shows her surrounded by Megamind, Hades, Nightcrawler and the Beast, all dressed as Chippendales Dancers. While those are all characters she admits to liking, the actual list was constructed from a poll of her female viewers, and all but one of those characters, namely the Beast, failed to place.
• The autographed cast picture where everyone was in their costumes was the first spoiler for To Boldly Flee, and taking the cue from Kickassia and Suburban Knights, fans wondered how Doug was going to emote at all with a giant Judge Dredd helmet covering half his face. In reality, he was only in the Dredd costume for ten minutes, so he was free to Puppy-Dog Eyes/Manly Tears away the rest of the time.

Parodies:

Comic Books

• Pinky and the Brain, mirroring the earlier Animaniacs, was spun off in its own comic book series. While the covers of both titles rarely showed scenes or concepts from the stories inside, the first Pinky and the Brain cover was notable for following the guidelines at the top of this page explicitly, with the Brain pronouncing "This is the way to make it big in the comic business!" The cover featured Pinky, the Brain, superheroine costumes, and a box of Kleenex. And it followed the one-inch-from-centre rule.
• Excalibur:
  • Parodied in an issue where Spider-Man guest-starred. The cover prominently displays our web-headed hero, who brags about how he's taking over this comic book, even though he already has four series of his own. None of the members of Excalibur themselves are depicted except for Captain Britain, who is shoved into the background.
  • Another Excalibur issue has an incredibly boring cover that certainly didn't happen inside the comic, with a morose-looking little man sweeping the floor and telling us that the usual comic-book cover stuff — muscular heroes fighting dastardly villains, and girls with big tits — is actually inside the comic book, and we should stop bothering him.
• Played with in an early issue of Thunderbolts, which guest starred Archangel of the X-Men and featured him prominently on the cover with the headline: "Will Archangel join the Thunderbolts?" And then, at the bottom and in only slightly smaller text: "Nah, he's only a guest star... but doesn't he look cool on this cover?"
• In a Superman comic where the cover says Lobo will make a one-page cameo, Lobo responds by swearing at the fact he only gets one page.
• As seen on the page image for Wolverine Publicity, there existed an alternate cover for an Anita Blake comic Marvel was putting out at the time featuring Wolverine and Anita, with a small caption reading "Wolverine does not actually appear in this issue."^note The cover in question was produced as part of a range of covers featuring Wolverine in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of the character's debut.
• Discussed and parodied in the golden age MAD feature "Movie... Ads!" A gritty War Is Hell picture devoid of female characters except for a scene where "for two seconds, a girl jumps out and kisses a soldier" is advertised as a torrid love story, with the woman's face and ballooning bust plastered all over the advertisement. An ad for an adventure movie depicts scenes taking place in different parts of the world edited together, with quotes from critics' negative reviews just as misleadingly spliced.
• This was fairly common in the late-nineties-early-2000s, making fun of earlier covers that played it straight. For example an issue of Impulse with a villain beating up Max Mercury while Bart ate popcorn declared "In This Issue ... absolutely nothing like this happens!"
• On a cover of Robin:
  Flash: We can't possibly escape this!
  Robin: Yeah. Good thing nothing like this happens in the comic.
• One of the most common fake-out covers is the image of all the heroes lying dead in a pile while the issue's villains stand triumphant. A Justice League of America issue spoofs this by having one of the villains say to the reader, "We don't really beat them... but it's a heck of a cover, isn't it?"
• Fantastic Four: This is played for laughs on the cover of the Impossible Man one-shot comic book, where the title character is sunning himself on a beach surrounded by practically every major Marvel hero buried up to their necks in the sand, with Impy making a threat to Doctor Doom (who's behind him) that implies he beat them up and did that because they were blocking his sun. There's nothing like this inside the comic, but given the humor-themed stories that are, it was clearly meant as a joke.
• She-Hulk had some fun with this. One particular issue had Punisher, Wolverine, and Spider-Man featured prominently on the cover, while She-Hulk tells the readers that they only appear on the book, not in it.
• Lampshaded with the cover to Star Brand #12. The cover has the X-Men, but the bottom left-hand corner has a caption saying The X-Men in the New Universe? Not bloody likely!
• Cerebus the Aardvark did a parody of this phenomenon by introducing a character named Wolveroach, an obvious spoof of Wolverine. Wolveroach showed up on three consecutive covers of Cerebus, in various badass action poses... while inside the comic itself, he spent all three issues in a coma. After he woke up, he stopped appearing on the covers.

Fan Works

• The cover image for Tealove's Steamy Adventure was deliberately made to be technically accurate (if you tilt your head and squint) but completely misleading. For example, there's a cave troll in the story. The cover pic features Nepeta from Homestuck, who is also a troll and lives in a cave, but is otherwise nothing like the cave troll from the story. The picture is full of nonsense along those lines.

Films — Live-Action

• This trope was made fun of in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey when the main title characters find themselves in Hell.
  Ted: This is not what I expected this place to look like at all.
  Bill: Yeah, we got totally lied to by our album covers, man.
• The Scary Movie series did it twice: the poster for the first movie makes it appear as though Shannon Elizabeth is the star (not Anna Faris - the DVD cover adds her◊ for justice). The fourth has King Kong, who doesn't appear in the movie (a spoof).
• The cover of the similar horror spoof Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th intentionally makes it seem like Tiffanni Thiesen plays the main character and the killer. She isn't.
• National Lampoon's Vacation has a cover that parodies Conan the Barbarian (1982), with the family patriarch presented as a Frank Frazetta beefcake who is stabbing the sky with a tennis racket and has leg clinging bimbos.

Literature

• Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind parodies this wonderfully with the advertising material for the eponymous game: "Actual games shots taken from a version you haven't bought".
• Parodied in The Areas of My Expertise, a book of fake trivia:.
  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported as "UNSOLD AND DESTROYED" to the Publisher and is stolen property. Also, you should be aware that the cover was awesome. It featured a painting of a metallic silver dragon flying up either to rescue or eat a beautiful, nearly nude sword maiden as she falls off a cliff. All of this is overseen by the bitter glare of the ever-uncaring Triple Suns. Plus, a very flattering portrait of the Author appeared within the Main Sun.
  • For the record, the book's real cover looks nothing like this. Although the dragon cover is printed on the inside of the cover of the paperback edition.
• There's a Filk Song that parodies the phenomenon: "There's a bimbo on the cover of my book".
  She is blonde and she is sexy
  She is nowhere in the text, she
  Is the bimbo on the cover of the book
• Parodied in Bimbos of the Death Sun. Engineering professor Jay Omega once wrote a novel about sunspots wrecking electronics and reducing the intelligence of women worldwide; the novel is well-written hard Science Fiction and not the least bit misogynistic. Unfortunately, the third-rate publishing house saddles it with a Frank Frazetta-style lustful cover, featuring a Fur Bikini-clad barbarian woman clinging to the leg of a muscle-bound scientist with a clipboard and computer, as well as the title Bimbos of the Death Sun. As a result, people assume both book and author are much more lurid than they really are, and Jay does his best to make sure as few people as possible know he wrote it. For extra recursion points, the actual Bimbos of the Death Sun was given a comparable cover;◊ the novel itself is a fairly tame (if funny) murder-mystery set at a sci-fi convention.
• In Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days, Greg's mom puts the kibosh on his book club selection because she doesn't like the scantily clad warrior woman on the cover. Greg notes that there are no women in the book's entire series and wonders if the cover artist even read the book.
• The first edition of Bored of the Rings included a rather erotic "excerpt" from the book as part of the front material. Naturally, nothing even remotely resembling the excerpt can be found in the actual text.
• Alan Coren packaged a collection of humorous short stories and essays into a book titled Golfing for Cats, with a huge Nazi swastika on the cover. The reasoning, as stated in the foreword, is that people are interested in golf, cats, and the Third Reich, so putting them all together would be superb marketing.
• The titular Meaning of Liff is "A book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover. For instance, any book the dust jacket of which bears the words, 'This book will change your life'." Needless to say, most editions come with a "This book will change your life" sticker on the cover. The Deeper Meaning of Liff is an aversion, as it redefined "Liff" as "as a phenomenon for which there is no word" and has no "change your life" blurb on it anywhere.

Live-Action TV

• Ernie Kovacs parodied this trope with a series of "more sex and violence" book covers, showing Little Women as ladies of ill repute, Peter Rabbit as a gangster, and a Webster's unabridged dictionary with a picture of a silhouette of a lady behind a window blind, with blurbs all over the cover such as "Unexpurgated!", "Four Letter Words!", and "Nothing Left Out!"
• In As Time Goes By, Lionel's extremely dull autobiography about planting coffee in Kenya is given a "pick-me-up-and-buy-me" cover (as his publisher Alastair puts it). What this translates to is a buxom blonde in half-open safari gear clinging to Lionel's legs while he holds a rifle against a jungle background, which infuriates Lionel and amuses Jean greatly.

Music

• The Melvins, a progressive psychedelic grunge/punk/metal band, use this as a Running Gag. Sometimes they do add a slight hint that something is amiss: the Houdini cover depicts two blonde children happily playing with a puppy in the style of a children's storybook illustration, but the puppy has two heads.
  • This was inspired by the Butthole Surfers's Locust Abortion Technician. An album that looks like this◊ and sounds like this. Melvins would even parody the Locust Abortion Technician artwork with their own Pinkus Abortion Technician - the former is a painting of a clown playfully waving a finger at a dog, the latter is a crude sketch of the same dog with a bloody severed finger in its mouth, apparently depicting the aftermath.
• The cover (and title) of Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats◊ says it all.
  • Greatest Hits takes a similar tack, using a tasteful fanservice photo of group member Cosey Fanni Tutti wearing a bikini inside of a tiki hut to make it look like some kind of "bachelor pad music" collection. Her expression is mildly Kubrick Stare-like though.
• Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart: Beefheart wears a carp's head on the album cover, not a trout's one.
• We're Only in It for the Money by Frank Zappa: From judging the album cover and the art work within you might expect this album to be an entire musical and lyrical parody of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but it's not. The only real similarity is that "The Chrome Plated Megaphone Of Destiny", just like "A Day In The Life", are both the closing track, both closing on one note slowly fading out at the end.
• Squeeze is announced as a Velvet Underground album on the cover, but is actually more a solo album by band member Doug Yule. Today it has been written out of canon and has been unavailable since the 1980s.

Video Games

• Capcom designed the box art◊ for the Retraux Mega Man 9 in the style of the original covers. The trend continued with Mega Man 10.
  • The box art was mocked even before that in Mega Man ZX Advent, where it was a part of side quest where a boy wanted cool pictures of heroes: upon seeing it, he immediately dismisses it as lame and lets you keep it. Upon looking it in your menu, the game states that "this "legendary hero" looks more like some sort of a colorful coal miner".
• The title screen for the Doom mod "Psychic" is a deliberately-bad drawing of a man in a red coat and hat lifting up a cooked chicken with psychic powers, with said psychic powers shown as the word "BRITAIN" pasted all over. The actual mod is very well-done, playing like a cross between Devil May Cry and System Shock.

Visual Novels

• Limited Run Games's Nintendo Switch re-release of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties features a new cover that presents the game as Animesque, when the game, in truth, consists almost entirely of still live-action photography. The one truthful thing about the cover is that the characters shown do appear in the game — even the chicken man.

Web Comics

• The Order of the Stick:
  • The prequel book Start of Darkness ends with the Monster in the Darkness complaining that the picture on the front of the book didn't actually happen like that. Ironically it's not all that inaccurate, though; it just amalgamates different parts of the story into one scene for a general overview.
  • In The Order of the Stick board game, one of the cards is "Dragon from the front of the box."
• The "cover" page of one The Wotch story arc shows Sykos turning the main characters into trees and saying "Good thing for them I don't actually do this, eh?"
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • One strip refers to the trope, although the cover of the book it would be in (#6)... well... the artist intentionally invokes this trope for the actual cover for that book. It features numerous characters who never met in-story, all crammed together, and a ninja, watching while Kevyn does something science-y.

• Deliberately used by Justin Pierce for the last published chapter of Killroy And Tina. The chapter is about Brandon gaining a magic glove that grants him Super-Speed, but eventually having to relinquish it. The cover image featured Brandon with gorilla arms, panicking over the fact that prom was scheduled to start in an hour. Pierce said that he went with a completely non-indicative Silver Age-homage because his original cover idea gave away too much of the plot.
• Sven's book in Will Write for Chocolate is about an all-male exploratory mission in outer space, but the book cover features a slinky blonde in a leopard-skin bikini.
• Parodied in The Noob. The squid people are the prominent feature of the game's expansion, but the Pointy-Haired Boss demanded it be replaced with a pair of boobs. 3D boobs.
  "Billy, have you decided what game you want?"
• Nana's Everyday Life has every single strip start with a panel in which Nana is cheerfully waving at the readers with a blue sky and a nice little suburb-ish house in the background. Nana's Everyday Life is the most horrific Black Comedy/Black Comedy Rape webcomic that can be found. Except, it eventually deconstructs Black Comedy as a whole and stops pretending to be funny.
• The homepage of Crystal Heroes is the first page of the comic, a parody of fantasy comics beginning with exposition pages, and gives the impression of a typical medieval fantasy setting before revealing it was actually a speech from an evangelist on a modern college campus.
• A webcomic by Setz turns it around by making the hillbilly-esque person on the cover of Phalanx be the starship's retired pilot.

Web Videos

• Stampy's Lovely World: The thumbnail for Episode 733, "Christmas Invasion", shows the Love Garden full of TNT, with the heavy implication that Hit The Target is planning on blowing it up. In the actual episode, the only thing HTT does to the Love Garden is walk through it to get to Stampy's house — what gets blown up is Stampy's bedroom.

Western Animation

• BoJack Horseman: Todd's favorite game Decapathon VII looks like an epic fantasy game with a hunky barbarian and bikini-clad fox babe on the cover and title screen, but the game itself appears to be a "match the shapes" puzzle game with just some skulls in the background.
• Phineas and Ferb: In one episode, Candace immediately dismisses books based on their covers; when Linda, her mom, says not to judge a book by its cover, Candace argues that books have covers to capture people's interest, and then asks why she picked these books. Linda begrudgingly admits that it was because they looked interesting, and leaves.
• Regular Show: In the episode "Death Punchies", Mordecai and Rigby are playing a video game called Dig Champs and say that the graphics in the game look just like the cover art.

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